UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA.  SAN  piEGO 


3  1822  01607  9097 


THE  BUSIfJESSpE 
BEINGj#0MAi 

WA  M.TARBEIiL 


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LIBRARY 

UNIVtTxSITY  OF 
CALIKOnNIA 

SAN  DIEGO      j 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CAUFORNIA  SAN  DIEGO 


3  1822  01607  9097     ^ 


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Central  University  Library 

University  of  California,  San  Diego 
Note:  This  item  is  subject  to  recall  after  two  weeks. 

Date  Due 


^hp  21 1993 

JUL  i  0  IBdJ 

^05-^^§3  -^ 

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UCSDLib. 


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THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NEW  YORK  •    BOSTON  •    CHICAGO 
DALLAS  •    SAN    FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limitkd 

LONDON   •    BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE 

BUSINESS  OF  BEING 

A  WOMAN 


BY 


IDA   M.   TARBELL 

ASSOCIATE  EDITOR  OF  THE  *'  AMERICAN  MA6AZIKB  " 

AUTHOR    OF  "life    OF   ABRAHAM    LINCOLN" 

"bistort  of  the  STANDARD  OIL  CO." 

"he  knew  i/INCOLN,"  ETC. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 
1912 

AU  rights  reserved 


COPYBIGHT,  1912, 

Bt  the  PHILLIPS  PUBLISHING  COMPANY. 


Copyright,  1912, 
Bt  the  MACMILLAN  COMPANY. 

Set  up  and  eIectrotyp«d.     Published  October,  1912.    Reprinted 
November,  1912. 


Nnrfaooti  iPrra* 

J.  S.  Oushlng  Co.  —  Berwick  &  Smith  Co. 

Norwood,  Mass.,  U.8.A^ 


TO 
E.  I.  T.   AND    C.  C.  T. 


Digitized  by  tlie  Internet  Arcliive 

in  2007  witli  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


littp://www.arcliive.org/details/businessofbeingwOOtarbiala 


INTRODUCTION 

The  object  of  this  little  volume  is  to 
call  attention  to  a  certain  distrust,  which 
the  author  feels  in  the  modern  woman, 
of  the  significance  and  dignity  of  the 
work  laid  upon  her  by  Nature  and  by 
society.  Its  ideas  are  the  result  of  a 
long,  if  somewhat  desultory,  observation 
of  the  professional,  political,  and  domes- 
tic activities  of  women  in  this  country 
and  in  France.  These  observations  have 
led  to  certain  definite  opinions  as  to 
those  phases  of  the  woman  question 
most  in  need  of  emphasis  to-day. 

A  great  problem  of  human  life  is  to 

preserve  faith  in  and  zest  for  everyday 

activities.     The  universal  easily  becomes 

the  vulgar   and  the   burdensome.    The 

vii 


INTRODUCTION 

highest  civiHzation  is  that  in  which  the 
largest  number  sense,  and  are  so  placed  as 
to  realize,  the  dignity  and  the  beauty  of 
the  common  experiences  and  obligations. 

The  courtesy  of  the  publishers  of  the 
American  Magazine^  in  permitting  the 
use  here  of  chapters  which  have  appeared 
in  that  periodical,  is  gratefully  acknowl- 
edged. 


vm 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

CHAPTSB  PAGE 

I.    The  Uneasy  Woman      ....  1 
n.    On  the  Imitation  of  Man  ...  30 
m.    The  Business  of  Being  a  Woman      .  53 
IV.    The  Socialization  of  the  Home          .  84 
V.    The  Woman  and  heb  Raiment     .         .109 
VI.    The  Woman  and  Democracy       .        .  142 
Vn.    The  Homeless  Daughter     .        .        .164 
Vlil.    The  Childless  Woman  and  the  Friend- 
less Child 190 

IX.    On  the  Ennobling  of  the  Woman's 

Business 216 


THE  BUSII^ESS  OF  BEING 
A  WOMAN 

CHAPTER    I 

THE   UNEASY   WOMAN 

The  most  conspicuous  occupation  of 
the  American  woman  of  to-day,  dress- 
ing herself  aside,  is  self-discussion.  It 
is  a  disquieting  phenomenon.  Chronic 
self-discussion  argues  chronic  ferment  of 
mind,  and  ferment  of  mind  is  a  serious 
handicap  to  both  happiness  and  effi- 
ciency. Nor  is  self -discussion  the  only  ex- 
hibit of  restlessness  the  American  woman 
gives.  To  an  unaccustomed  observer 
she  seems  always  to  be  running  about  on 
the  face  of  things  with  no  other  purpose 

B  1 


THE   BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

than  to  put  in  her  time.  He  points  to 
the  triviality  of  the  things  in  which  she 
can  immerse  herself  —  her  fantastic  and 
ever-changing  raiment,  the  welter  of  lec- 
tures and  other  culture  schemes  which  she 
supports,  the  eagerness  with  which  she 
transports  herself  to  the  ends  of  the  earth 
—  as  marks  of  a  spirit  not  at  home  with 
itself,  and  certainly  not  convinced  that 
it  is  going  in  any  particular  direction  or 
that  it  is  committed  to  any  particular 
worth-while  task. 

Perhaps  the  most  disturbing  side  of 
the  phenomenon  is  that  it  is  coincident 
with  the  emancipation  of  woman.  At  a 
time  when  she  is  freer  than  at  any  other 
period  of  the  world's  history  —  save  per- 
haps at  one  period  in  ancient  Egypt  — 
she  is  apparently  more  uneasy. 

Those  who  do  not  like  the  exhibit  are 
inclined  to  treat  her  as  if  she  were  a  new 
historical  type.     The  reassuring  fact  is, 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

that  ferment  of  mind  is  no  newer  thing 
in  woman  than  in  man.  It  is  a  human 
ailment.  Its  attacks,  however,  have  al- 
ways been  unwelcome.  Society  distrusts 
uneasiness  in  sacred  quarters ;  that  is, 
in  her  established  and  privileged  works. 
They  are  the  best  mankind  has  to  show 
for  itself.  At  least  they  are  the  things  for 
which  the  race  has  slaved  longest  and 
which  so  far  have  best  resisted  attack. 
We  would  like  to  pride  ourselves  that 
they  were  permanent,  that  we  had  set- 
tled some  things.  And  hence  society 
resents  a  restless  woman.  And  this  is 
logical  enough. 

Embroiled  as  man  is  in  an  eternal 
effort  to  conquer,  understand,  and  reduce 
to  order  both  nature  and  his  fellows,  it 
is  imperative  that  he  have  some  secure 
spot  where  his  head  is  not  in  danger,  his 
heart  is  not  harassed.  Woman,  by  virtue 
of  the  business  nature  assigns  her,  has 
8 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

always  been  theoretically  the  maker  and 
keeper  of  this  necessary  place  of  peace. 
But  she  has  rarely  made  it  and  kept  it 
with  full  content.  Eve  was  a  revoltee, 
so  was  Medea.  In  every  century  they 
have  appeared,  restless  Amazons,  protest- 
ing and  remolding.  Out  of  their  uneasy 
souls  have  come  the  varying  changes 
in  the  woman's  world  which  distinguish 
the  ages. 

Society  has  not  liked  it  —  was  there  to 
be  no  quiet  anywhere  ?  It  is  poor  under- 
standing that  does  not  appreciate  John 
Adams'  parry  of  his  wife  Abigail's  list  of 
grievances,  which  she  declared  the  Con- 
tinental Congress  must  relieve  if  it  would 
avoid  a  woman's  rebellion.  Under  the 
stress  of  the  Revolution  children,  ap- 
prentices, schools,  colleges,  Indians,  and 
negroes  had  all  become  insolent  and 
turbulent,  he  told  her.  What  was  to 
become  of  the  country  if  women,  "the 
4 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

most  numerous  and  powerful  tribe  in  the 
world,"  grew  discontented  ? 

Now  this  world-old  restlessness  of  the 
women  has  a  sound  and  a  tragic  cause. 
Nature  lays  a  compelling  hand  on  her. 
Unless  she  obeys  freely  and  fully  she  must 
pay  in  unrest  and  vagaries.  For  the 
normal  woman  the  fulfillment  of  life  is 
the  making  of  the  thing  we  best  describe 
as  a  home  —  which  means  a  mate,  chil- 
dren, friends,  with  all  the  radiating  obliga- 
tions, joys,  burdens,  these  relations  imply. 

This  is  nature's  plan  for  her;  but  the 
home  has  got  to  be  founded  inside  the  im- 
perfect thing  we  call  society.  And  these 
two,  nature  and  society,  are  continually 
getting  into  each  other's  way,  wrecking 
each  other's  plans,  frustrating  each  other's 
schemes.  The  woman  almost  never  is 
able  to  adjust  her  life  so  as  fully  to  satisfy 
both.  She  is  between  two  fires.  Eurip- 
ides understood  this  when  he  put  into 

6 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Medea's  mouth  a  cry  as  modern  as  any 
that  Ibsen  has  conceived  :  — 

Of  all  things  upon  earth  that  grow, 
A  herb  most  bruised  is  woman.     We  must  pay 
Our  store  of  gold,  hoarded  for  that  one  day, 
To  buy  us  some  man's  love  ;  and  lo,  they  bring 
A  master  of  our  flesh  !     There  comes  the  sting 
Of  the  whole  shame.     And  then  the  jeopardy, 
For  good  or  ill,  what  shall  that  master  be  ; 
'Tis  magic  she  must  have  or  prophecy  — 
Home  never  taught  her  that  —  how  best  to  guide 
Toward  peace  this  thing  that  sleepeth  at  her  side. 
And  she  who,  laboring  long,  shall  find  some  way 
Whereby  her  lord  may  bear  with  her,  nor  fray 
His  yoke  too  fiercely,  blessed  is  the  breath 
That  woman  draws  ! 

Medea's  difficulty  was  that  which  is 
oftenest  in  the  way  of  a  woman  carrying 
her  business  in  life  to  a  satisfactory 
completion  —  false  mating.  It  is  not  a 
difficulty  peculiar  to  woman.  Man 
knows  it  as  often.  It  is  the  heaviest 
curse  society  brings  on  human  beings  — 
the  most  fertile  cause  of  apathy,  agony, 
6 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

and  failure.  If  the  woman's  cry  is  more 
poignant  under  it  than  the  man's,  it  is 
because  the  machine  which  holds  them 
both  allows  him  a  wider  sweep,  more 
interests  outside  of  their  immediate  al- 
liance. *'A  man,  when  he  is  vexed  at 
home,"  complains  Medea,  "can  go  out 
and  find  relief  among  his  friends  or 
acquaintances,  but  we  women  have  none 
to  look  at  but  him." 

And  when  it  is  impossible  longer  to 
"look"  at  him,  what  shall  she  do  !  Tell 
her  woe  to  the  world,  seek  a  soporific, 
repudiate  the  scheme  of  things,  or  from 
the  vantage  point  of  her  failure  turn  to 
the  untried  relations  of  her  life,  call 
upon   her   unused  powers  ? 

From  the  beginning  of  time  she  has 
tried  each  and  all  of  these  methods  of 
meeting  her  purely  human  woe.  At  times 
the  women  of  whole  peoples  have  sunk 
into   apathy,   their   business   reduced   to 

7 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

its  dullest,  grossest  forms.  Again,  whole 
groups  have  taken  themselves  out  of 
the  partnership  which  both  Nature  and 
Society  have  ordered.  The  Amazons  re- 
fused to  recognize  man  as  an  equal  and 
mated  simply  that  they  might  rear  more 
women  like  themselves.  Here  the  tables 
were  turned  and  the  boy  baby  turned 
out  —  not  to  the  wolves,  but  to  man  ! 
The  convent  has  always  been  a  favorite 
way  of  escape. 

It  has  never  been  a  majority  of  women 
who  for  a  great  length  of  time  have 
shirked  this  problem  by  any  one  of  these 
methods.  By  individuals  and  by  groups 
woman  has  always  been  seeking  to 
develop  the  business  of  life  to  such 
proportions,  to  so  diversify,  refine,  and 
broaden  it  that  no  half  failure  or  utter 
failure  of  its  fundamental  relations  would 
swamp  her,  leave  her  comfortless,  or 
prevent  her  working  out  that  family 
8 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

which  she  knew  to  be  her  part  in  the 
scheme  of  things.  It  is  from  her  con- 
scious attempt  to  make  the  best  of  things 
when  they  are  proved  bad,  that  there  has 
come  the  uneasiness  which  trails  along 
her  path  from  Eve  to  Mrs.  Pankhurst. 

When  great  changes  have  come  in  the 
social  system,  her  quest  has  responded 
to  them,  taken  its  color  and  direction 
from  them.  The  peculiar  forms  of  un- 
easiness in  the  American  woman  of  to-day 
come  naturally  enough  from  the  Revo- 
lution of  1776.  That  movement  upset 
theoretically  everything  which  had  been 
expected  of  her  before.  Theoretically, 
it  broke  down  the  division  fences  which 
had  kept  her  in  sets  and  groups.  She 
was  no  longer  to  be  a  woman  of  class ;  she 
was  a  woman  of  the  people.  This  was 
striking  at  the  very  underpinning  of 
femininity,  as  the  world  knew  it.  Theo- 
retically, too,  her  ears  were  no  longer  to 
9 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

be  closed  to  all  ideas  save  those  of  her 
church  or  party,  —  a  new  thing,  freedom 
of  speech,  was  abroad,  —  her  lips  were 
opened  with  man's.  Moreover,  her  busi- 
ness of  family  building  was  modified, 
as  well  as  her  attitude  towards  life. 
The  necessity  of  all  women  educating 
themselves  that  they  might  be  able  to 
educate  their  children  was  an  obligation 
on  the  face  of  the  new  undertaking. 
Another  revolutionary  duty  put  upon 
her  was  —  paying  her  way.  There  can 
be  no  real  democracy  where  there  is 
parasitism.  She  must  achieve  conscious 
independence  whether  in  or  out  of  the 
family.  Unquestionably  there  came  with 
the  Revolution  a  vision  of  a  new  woman 
—  a  woman  from  whom  all  of  the  will- 
fulness and  frivolity  and  helplessness  of 
the  "Lady"  of  the  old  regime  should 
be  stripped,  while  all  her  qualities  of  gen- 
tleness and  charm  should  be  preserved. 
10 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

The  old-world  lady  was  to  be  merged 
into  a  woman  strong,  capable,  severely 
beautiful,  a  creature  who  had  all  of 
the  virtues  and  none  of  the  follies  of 
femininity. 

It  was  strong  yeast  they  put  into  the 
pot  in  '76. 

A  fresh  leaven  in  a  people  can  never 
be  distributed  evenly.  Moreover,  the 
mass  to  which  it  is  applied  is  never  hom- 
ogeneous. There  are  spots  so  hard  no 
yeast  can  move  them ;  there  are  others  so 
light  the  yeast  burns  them  out.  Taken 
as  a  whole,  the  change  is  labored  and 
painful.  So  our  new  notions  worked  on 
women.  There  were  groups  which  re- 
sented and  refused  them,  became  reac- 
tionary at  the  stating  of  them.  There 
were  those  which  grew  grave  and  troubled 
under  them,  shrinking  from  the  porten- 
tous upheaval  they  felt  in  their  touch, 
yet  sensing  that  they  must  be  accepted. 
11 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

There  were  still  others  where  the  notion 
frothed  and  foamed,  turning  up  unex- 
pected ideas,  revealing  depths  of  dissatis- 
faction, of  desire,  of  unsuspected  powers 
in  woman  that  startled  the  staid  old 
world.  It  was  in  these  quarters  that 
there  was  produced  the  uneasy  woman 
typical  of  the  day. 

Her  ferment  went  to  the  bottom  of 
things  this  time.  Not  since  the  age 
of  the  Amazon  had  a  body  of  women 
broken  more  utterly  with  things  as  they 
are.  And  like  the  Amazon,  the  revolt 
was  against  man  and  his  pretensions. 

It  was  no  unorganized  revolt.  It  was 
deliberate.  It  presented  her  case  in  a 
carefully  prepared  List  of  Grievances, 
and  an  eloquent  Declaration  of  Senti- 
ments^ both  adopted  in  a  strictly  parlia- 

1  DECLARATION  OF  SENTIMENTS 
When,  in  the  course  of  human  events,  it  becomes  necessary 
for  one  portion  of  the  family  of  man  to  assume  among  the 
people  of  the  earth  a  position  different  from  that  which  they 
12 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

mentary  way,  and  made  the  basis  of  an 
organized  revolt,  which  has  gone  on 
systematically  ever  since.  The  essence 
of   her   complaint,    as   embodied   in   the 

have  hitherto  occupied,  but  one  to  which  the  laws  of  nature 
and  of  nature's  God  entitles  them,  a  decent  respect  to  the 
opinions  of  mankind  requires  that  they  should  declare  the 
causes  that  impel  them  to  such  a  course. 

We  hold  these  truths  to  be  self-evident :  that  all  men  and 
women  are  created  equal;  that  they  are  endowed  by  their 
Creator  with  certain  inalienable  rights ;  that  among  these  are 
life,  hberty,  and  the  pursuit  of  happiness ;  that  to  secure  these 
rights  governments  are  instituted,  deriving  their  just  power 
from  the  consent  of  the  governed.  Whenever  any  form  of 
government  becomes  destructive  of  these  ends,  it  is  the  right 
of  those  who  suffer  from  it  to  refuse  allegiance  to  it,  and  to  in- 
sist upon  the  institution  of  a  new  government,  laying  its  founda- 
tion on  such  principles,  and  organizing  its  powers  in  such  form, 
as  to  them  shall  seem  most  Ukely  to  efifect  their  safety  and 
happiness.  Prudence,  indeed,  will  dictate  that  governments 
long  established  should  not  be  changed  for  light  and  transient 
causes ;  and  accordingly  all  experience  hath  shown  that  man- 
kind are  more  disposed  to  suffer,  while  evils  are  sufferable, 
than  to  right  themselves  by  abolishing  the  forms  to  which 
they  were  accustomed.  But  when  a  long  train  of  abuses  and 
usurpations,  pursuing  invariably  the  same  object,  evinces  a 
design  to  reduce  them  under  absolute  despotism,  it  is  their 
duty  to  throw  off  such  government,  and  to  provide  new  guards 
for  their  future  security.  Such  has  been  the  patient  sufferance 
of  the  women  under  this  government,  and  such  is  now  the 

IS 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

above  expression,  is  that  man  is  a  con- 
scious tyrant  holding  woman  an  un- 
wilHng   captive  —  cutting   her    off    from 

necessity  which  constrains  them  to  demand  the  equal  station 
to  which  they  are  entitled. 

The  history  of  mankind  is  a  history  of  repeated  injuries 
and  usurpations  on  the  part  of  man  towards  woman,  having 
in  direct  object  the  establishment  of  an  absolute  tyranny  over 
her.     To  prove  this,  let  facts  be  submitted  to  a  candid  world. 

He  has  never  permitted  her  to  exercise  her  inaUenable  right 
to  the  elective  franchise. 

He  has  compelled  her  to  submit  to  laws,  in  the  formation 
of  which  she  has  no  voice. 

He  has  withheld  from  her  rights  which  are  given  to  the 
most  ignorant  and  degraded  men  —  both  natives  and  for- 
eigners. 

Having  deprived  her  of  this  first  right  of  a  citizen,  the  elec- 
tive franchise,  thereby  leaving  her  without  representation  in 
the  halls  of  legislation,  he  has  oppressed  her  on  all  sides. 

He  has  made  her,  if  married,  in  the  eyes  of  the  law,  civilly 
dead. 

He  has  taken  from  her  all  right  in  property,  even  to  the 
wages  she  earns. 

He  has  made  her,  morally,  an  irresponsible  being,  as  she 
can  commit  many  crimes  with  impunity,  provided  they  be 
done  in  the  presence  of  her  husband.  In  the  covenant  of 
marriage,  she  is  compelled  to  promise  obedience  to  her  hus- 
band, he  becoming,  to  all  intents  and  purposes,  her  master  — 
the  law  giving  him  power  to  deprive  her  of  her  liberty,  and  to 
administer  chastisement. 

14 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

the  things  in  life  which  really  matter: 
education,  freedom  of  speech,  the  ballot; 
that  she  can  never  be  his   equal   until 

He  has  so  framed  the  laws  of  divorce,  as  to  what  shall  be 
the  proper  causes,  and  in  case  of  separation,  to  whom  the 
guardianship  of  the  children  shall  be  given,  as  to  be  wholly 
regardless  of  the  happiness  of  women  —  the  law,  in  all  cases, 
going  upon  a  false  supposition  of  the  supremacy  of  man,  and 
giving  all  power  into  his  hands. 

After  depriving  her  of  all  rights  as  a  married  woman,  if 
single,  and  the  owner  of  property,  he  has  taxed  her  to  support 
a  government  which  recognizes  her  only  when  her  property 
can  be  made  profitable  to  it. 

He  has  monopolized  nearly  all  the  profitable  employments, 
and  from  those  she  is  permitted  to  follow,  she  receives  but  a 
scanty  remuneration.  He  closes  against  her  all  the  avenues 
to  wealth  and  distinction  which  he  considers  most  honorable 
to  himself.  As  a  teacher  of  theology,  medicine,  or  law,  she  is 
not  known. 

He  has  denied  her  the  facilities  for  obtaining  a  thorough 
education,  all  colleges  being  closed  against  her. 

He  allows  her  in  Church,  as  well  as  State,  but  a  subordinate 
position,  claiming  Apostolic  authority  for  her  exclusion  from 
the  ministry,  and,  with  some  exception,  from  any  public  par- 
ticipation in  the  afifairs  of  the  Church. 

He  has  created  a  false  sentiment  by  giving  to  the  world  a 
different  code  of  morals  for  men  and  women,  by  which  moral 
delinquencies  which  exclude  women  from  society  are  not  only 
tolerated,  but  deemed  of  little  account  in  man. 

He  has  usurped  the  prerogative  of  Jehovah  himself,  claim- 

15 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

she  does  the  same  things  her  tyrant  does, 
studies  the  book  he  studies,  practices  the 
trades  and  professions  he  practices,  works 
with  him  in  government. 

The  inference  from  all  this  is  that  the 
Business  of  Being  a  Woman,  as  it  has  been 
conducted  heretofore  by  society,  is  of  less 
importance  than  the  Business  of  Being  a 
Man,  and  that  the  time  has  come  to  enter 
his  world  and  prove  her  equality. 

There  are  certain  assumptions  in  her 
program  which  will  bear  examination. 
Is  man  the  calculating  tyrant  the  modern 
uneasy  woman  charges  ?  Are  her  fet- 
ters due  only  to  his  unfair  domination  ? 
Or  is  she  suffering  from  the  generally 
bungling  way  things  go  in  the  world  ? 
And  is  not  man  a  victim  as  well  as  she 

ing  it  as  his  right  to  assign  for  her  a  sphere  of  action,  when  that 
belongs  to  her  conscience  and  to  her  God. 

He  has  endeavored,  in  every  way  that  he  could,  to  destroy 
her  confidence  in  her  own  powers,  to  lessen  her  self-respect, 
and  to  make  her  willing  to  lead  a  dependent  and  abject  life. 

16 


THE   UNEASY  WOMAN 

—  caught  in  the  same  trap  ?  Moreover, 
is  woman  never  a  tyrant  ?  One  of  the 
first  answers  to  her  original  revolt  came 
from  the  most  eminent  woman  of  the 
day,  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe,  and  it  was 
called  ''Pink  and  White  Tyranny  !"  *'I 
have  seen  a  collection  of  medieval  English 
poems,"  says  Chesterton,  *'in  which  the 
section  headed  *  Poems  of  Domestic  Life' 
consisted  entirely  (literally  entirely)  of 
the  complaints  of  husbands  bullied  by 
their  wives." 

Again,  will  doing  the  same  things  a  man 
does  work  as  well  in  stifling  her  unrest  as 
she  fancies  it  has  in  man's  case  ?  If  a 
woman's  temperamental  and  intellectual 
operations  were  identical  with  a  man's, 
there  would  be  hope  of  success,  —  but 
they  are  not.  She  is  a  different  being. 
Whether  she  is  better  or  worse,  stronger 
or  weaker,  primary  or  secondary,  is  not 
the  question.  She  is  different, 
c  17 


THE  BUSINESS   OF  BEING  A  WOIVIAN 

And  she  tries  to  ease  a  world-old  human 
curse  by  imitating  the  occupations,  points 
of  views,  and  methods  of  a  radically  dif- 
ferent being.  Can  she  realize  her  quest 
in  this  way  ?  Generally  speaking,  noth- 
ing is  more  wasteful  in  human  operations 
than  following  a  course  which  is  not  native 
and  spontaneous,  not  according  to  the 
law  of  the  being. 

If  she  demonstrates  her  points,  suc- 
cessfully copies  man's  activities,  can  she 
impress  her  program  on  any  great  body 
of  women  ?  The  mass  of  women  believe 
in  their  task.  Its  importance  is  not 
capable  of  argument  in  their  minds. 
Nor  do  they  see  themselves  dwarfed 
by  their  business.  They  know  instinc- 
tively that  under  no  other  circumstances 
can  such  ripeness  and  such  wisdom  be 
developed,  that  nowhere  else  is  the  full 
nature  called  upon,  nowhere  else  are 
there  such  intricate,  delicate,  and  in- 
18 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

timate  forces  in  play,  calling  and  testing 
them. 

To  bear  and  to  rear,  to  feel  the  de- 
pendence of  man  and  child  —  the  neces- 
sity for  themselves  —  to  know  that  upon 
them  depend  the  health,  the  character, 
the  happiness,  the  futm*e  of  certain  human 
beings  —  to  see  themselves  laying  and 
preserving  the  foundations  of  so  im- 
posing a  thing  as  a  family  —  to  build 
so  that  this  family  shall  become  a 
strong  stone  in  the  state  —  to  feel  them- 
selves through  this  family  perpetuating 
and  perfecting  church,  society,  republic, 
—  this  is  their  destiny,  —  this  is  worth 
while.  They  may  not  be  able  to  state 
it,  but  all  their  instincts  and  experiences 
convince  them  of  the  supreme  and  eternal 
value  of  their  place  in  the  world.  They 
dare  not  tamper  with  it.  Their  opposi- 
tion to  the  militant  program  badly  and 
even  cruelly  expressed  at  times  has  at 
19 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

bottom,  as  an  opposition  always  has, 
the  principle  of  preservation.  It  is  not 
bigotry  or  vanity  or  a  petty  notion  of  their 
own  spheres  which  has  kept  the  majority 
of  women  from  lending  themselves  to 
the  radical  wing  of  the  woman's  move- 
ment. It  is  fear  to  destroy  a  greater 
thing  which  they  possess.  The  fear  of 
change  is  not  an  irrational  thing  —  the 
fear  of  change  is  founded  on  the  risk 
of  losing  what  you  have,  on  the  certainty 
of  losing  much  temporarily  at  least.  It 
sees  the  cost,  the  ugly  and  long  period 
of  transition. 

Moreover,  respect  for  your  calling 
brings  patience  with  its  burden  and  its 
limitations.  The  change  you  desire  you 
work  for  conservatively,  if  at  all.  The 
women  who  opposed  the  first  movement 
for  women's  rights  in  this  country  might 
deplore  the  laws  that  gave  a  man  the  power 
to  beat  his  wife  —  but  as  a  matter  of  fact 
20 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

few  men  did  beat  their  wives,  and  popular 
opinion  was  a  powerful  weapon.  They 
might  deplore  the  laws  of  property  — 
but  few  of  them  were  deeply  touched  by 
them.  The  husband,  the  child,  the  home, 
the  social  circle,  the  church,  these  things 
were  infinitely  more  interesting  and  im- 
portant to  them  than  diplomas,  rights 
to  work,  rights  to  property,  rights  to 
vote.  All  the  sentiments  in  the  revolting 
women's  program  seemed  trivial,  cold, 
profitless  beside  the  realities  of  life  as 
they  dreamed  them  and  struggled  to 
realize  them. 

It  is  this  same  intuitive  loyalty  to  her 
Business  of  Being  a  Woman,  her  unwill- 
ingness to  have  it  tampered  with,  that  is 
to-day  the  great  obstacle  to  our  Uneasy 
Woman  putting  her  program  of  relief  into 
force.  And  it  is  the  effort  to  move  this 
mass  which  she  derides  as  inert  that 
leads  to  much  of  the  overemphasis  in 
21 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

her  program  and  her  methods.  If  she  is 
to  attract  attention,  she  must  be  extreme. 
The  campaigner  is  Hke  the  actor  — 
he  must  exaggerate  to  get  his  effect  over 
the  foothghts.  Moreover,  there  are  na- 
tures Hke  that  of  the  actor  who  could 
not  play  Othello  unless  his  whole  body 
was  blackened.  Nor  is  the  extravagance 
of  the  methods,  which  the  militant  lady 
follows  to  put  over  her  program,  so 
foreign  to  her  nature  as  it  may  seem. 
The  suffragette  adapts  to  her  needs  a 
form  of  feminine  coquetry  as  old  as  the 
world.  To  defy  and  denounce  the  male 
has  always  been  one  of  woman's  most 
successful  provocative  ways  ! 

However  much  certain  of  the  assump- 
tions in  her  program  may  seem  to  be 
against  its  success,  there  is  much  for  it. 
It  gives  her  a  scapegoat  —  an  outside, 
personal,  attackable  cause  for  the  limita- 
tions and  defeats  she  suffers.  And  there 
£2 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

is  no  greater  consolation  than  fixing 
blame.  It  is  half  a  cure  in  itself  to 
know  or  to  think  you  know  the  cause 
of  your  diflSculties.  Moreover,  it  gives 
her  a  scapegoat  against  whom  it  is  easy 
to  make  up  a  case.  She  knows  him  too 
well,  much  better  than  he  knows  her, 
much  better  than  she  knows  herself; 
at  least  her  knowledge  of  him  is  better 
formulated.  And  she  has  this  advantage : 
custom  makes  it  cowardly  for  a  man  to 
attempt  to  demonstrate  that  woman  is  a 
tyrant  —  it  laughs  and  applauds  woman's 
attempt  to  fix  the  charge  on  man. 

It  gives  her  a  definite  program  of  relief. 
To  attack  life  as  man  does  :  to  secure  the 
same  kind  of  training,  enter  a  trade  or 
profession  where  she  can  support  herself, 
mingle  with  the  crowd  as  he  does,  get 
into  politics  —  that  she  assumes  to  be 
the  practical  way  of  curing  the  inferiority 
of  position  and  of  powers  which  she  is 
23 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

willing  to  admit,  even  willing  to  demon- 
strate. That  a  man's  life  may  not  be 
altogether  satisfactory,  she  declines  to 
believe.  The  uneasy  woman  has  always 
taken  it  for  granted  that  man  is  happier 
than  woman.  It  is  an  assumption  which 
is  at  least  discussible. 

Her  program,  too,  has  the  immense 
advantage  of  including  all  that  the  new 
order  of  things  in  this  country,  instituted 
by  the  Revolution,  made  imperative  for 
women  —  the  schooling,  the  liberty  of 
action,  the  independent  pocket  book.  Be- 
cause she  has  formulated  these  notions  so 
definitely  and  has  hammered  on  them  so 
hard,  the  militant  woman  frequently 
claims  that  they  originated  with  her, 
that  she  is  the  cause  of  the  great  devel- 
opment in  educational  opportunities,  in 
freedom  to  work  and  to  circulate,  in  the 
increasing  willingness  to  face  the  facts  of 
life  and  speak  the  truth.  This  claim  she 
24 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

should  drop.  She  is  rather  the  logical 
result  of  these  notions,  their  extreme 
expression.  She  has,  however,  had  an 
enormous  influence  in  keeping  them  alive 
in  the  great  slow-moving  mass  of  women, 
where  the  fate  of  new  ideas  rests  and 
where  they  are  always  tried  out  with 
extreme  caution.  Without  her  the  vision 
of  enlarging  and  liberalizing  their  own 
particular  business  to  meet  the  needs  of 
the  New  Democracy  which  so  exalted 
the  women  of  the  Revolution,  would  not 
to-day  be  as  nearly  realized  as  it  is.  To 
speak  slightingly  of  her  part  in  the 
women's  movement  is  uncomprehending. 
She  was  then,  and  always  has  been,  a 
tragic  figure,  this  woman  in  the  front  of 
the  woman's  movement  —  driven  by  a 
great  unrest,  sacrificing  old  ideals  to 
attain  new,  losing  herself  in  a  frantic 
and  frequently  blind  struggle,  often  put- 
ting back  her  cause  by  the  sad  illustration 
25 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

she  was  of  the  price  that  must  be  paid 
to  attain  a  result.  Certainly  no  woman 
who  to-day  takes  it  as  a  matter  of  course 
that  she  should  study  what  she  chooses, 
go  and  come  as  she  will,  support  herself 
unquestioned  by  trade,  profession,  or  art, 
work  in  public  or  private,  handle  her  own 
property,  share  her  children  on  equal 
terms  with  her  husband,  receive  a  respect- 
ful attention  on  platform  or  before  legis- 
lature, live  freely  in  the  world,  should 
think  with  anything  but  reverence  par- 
ticularly of  the  early  disturbers  of  con- 
vention and  peace,  for  they  were  an 
essential  element  in  the  achievement. 

The  great  strength  of  the  radical  pro- 
gram is  now,  as  it  has  always  been,  the 
powerful  appeal  it  makes  to  the  serious 
young  woman.  Man  and  marriage  are 
a  trap  —  that  is  the  essence  the  young 
woman  draws  from  the  campaign  for 
woman's   rights.      All   the  vague  terror 


THE   UNEASY  WOMAN 

which  at  times  runs  through  a  girl's 
dream  of  marriage,  the  sudden  vision  of 
probable  agonies,  of  possible  failure  and 
death,  become  under  the  teachings  of  the 
militant  woman  so  many  realities.  She 
sees  herself  a  "slave,"  as  the  jargon  has 
it,  putting  all  her  eggs  into  one'  basket 
with  the  certainty  that  some,  perhaps 
all,  will  be  broken. 

The  new  gospel  offers  an  escape  from 
all  that.  She  will  be  a  "free"  individual, 
not  one  "tied"  to  a  man.  The  "drudg- 
ery" of  the  household  she  will  exchange 
for  what  she  conceives  to  be  the  broad 
and  inspiring  work  which  men  are  doing. 
For  the  narrow  life  of  the  family  she 
will  escape  to  the  excitement  and  triumph 
of  a  "career."  The  Business  of  Being  a 
Woman  becomes  something  to  be  apolo- 
gized for.  All  over  the  land  there  are 
women  with  children  clamoring  about 
them,  apologizing  for  never  having  done 
27 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

anything  !  Women  whose  days  are  spent 
in  trade  and  professions  complacently 
congratulate  themselves  that  they  at 
least  have  lived.  There  were  girls  in 
the  early  days  of  the  movement,  as  there 
no  doubt  are  to-day,  who  prayed  on 
their  knees  that  they  might  escape  the 
frightful  isolation  of  marriage,  might 
be  free  to  "live"  and  to  "work,"  to 
"know"  and  to  "do." 

What  it  was  really  all  about  they  never 
knew  until  it  was  too  late.  That  is, 
they  examined  neither  the  accusations 
nor  the  premises.  They  accepted  them. 
Strong  young  natures  are  quick  to  accept 
charges  of  injustice.  To  them  it  is  un- 
natural that  life  should  be  hampered, 
that  it  should  be  anything  but  radiant. 
Curing  injustice,  too,  seems  particularly 
easy  to  the  young.  It  is  simply  a  matter 
of  finding  a  remedy  and  putting  it  into 
force!     The  young  American  woman  of 


THE  UNEASY  WOMAN 

militant  cast  finds  it  is  easy  to  believe 
that  the  Business  of  Being  a  Woman  is 
slavery.  She  has  her  mother's  pains 
and  sacrifices  and  tears  before  her,  and 
she  resents  them.  She  meets  the  theory 
on  every  hand  that  the  distress  she 
loathes  is  of  man's  doing,  that  it  is  for  her 
to  revolt,  to  enter  his  business,  and  so 
doing  escape  his  tyranny,  find  a  worth- 
while life  for  herself,  and  at  the  same  time 
help  "liberate"  her  sex. 

And  so  for  sixty  years  she  has  been 
working  on  this  thesis.  That  she  has 
not  demonstrated  it  sufficiently  to  satisfy 
even  herself  is  shown  by  the  fact  that 
she  is  still  the  most  conspicuous  of  Uneasy 
Women.  But  that  she  has  produced  a 
type  and  an  influential  one  is  certain. 
Indeed,  she  may  be  said  to  have  demon- 
strated sufficiently  for  practical  purposes 
what  there  is  for  her  in  imitating  the 
activities  of  man. 

29 


CHAPTER  II 

ON   THE   IMITATION   OF   MAN 

Fresh  attacks  on  life,  like  chemical 
experiments,  turn  up  unexpected  by- 
products. The  Uneasy  Woman,  driven 
by  the  thirst  for  greater  freedom,  and 
believing  man's  way  of  life  will  assuage 
it,  lays  siege  to  his  kingdom.  Some  of  the 
unexpected  loot  she  has  carried  away  still 
embarrasses  her.  Not  a  little,  however, 
is  of  such  undeniable  advantage  that 
she  may  fairly  contend  that  its  capture 
alone  justifies  her  campaign. 

Go  to-day  into  many  a  woman's  club 
house,  into  many  a  drawing-room  or 
studio  at,  let  us  say,  the  afternoon  tea 
hour,  and  what  will  you  see  ?  One  or 
probably  more  women  in  mannish  suits 
30 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

and  boots  calmly  smoking  cigarettes  while 
they  talk,  and  talk  well,  about  things  in 
which  women  are  not  supposed  to  be 
interested,  but  which  it  is  apparent  they 
understand. 

Look  the  exhibit  over.  It  is  made, 
you  at  once  recognize,  by  women  of 
character,  position,  and  sense.  They 
have  simply  found  certain  masculine 
ways  to  their  liking  and  adopted  them. 
The  probability  is  that  if  anybody  should 
object  to  their  habits,  many  of  them 
would  be  as  bewildered  as  are  the  great 
majority  of  Americans  by  the  demonstra- 
tion that  "nice"  women  can  smoke  and 
think  nothing  of  it ! 

The  cigarette,  the  boot,  and  much  of  the 
talk  are  only  by-products  of  the  woman's 
invasion  of  the  man's  world.  She  did 
not  set  out  to  win  these  spoils.  They 
came  to  her  in  the  campaign  ! 

The  objects  of  her  attack  were  things 
31 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

she  considered  more  fundamental.  She 
was  dissatisfied  with  the  way  her  brain  was 
being  trained,  her  time  employed,  her 
influence  directed.  "Give  us  the  man's 
way,"  was  her  demand,  "then  we  shall 
understand  real  things,  can  fill  our  days 
with  important  tasks,  will  count  as  human 
beings." 

There  was  no  uncertainty  in  her  notion 
of  how  this  was  to  be  accomplished.  A 
woman  rarely  feels  uncertainty  about 
methods.  She  instinctively  sees  a  way 
and  follows  it  with  assurance.  Half  her 
irritation  against  man  has  always  been 
that  he  is  a  spendthrift  with  time  and 
talk.  Madame  Roland,  sitting  at  her 
sewing  table  listening  to  the  excited 
debate  of  the  Revolutionists  in  her  salon, 
mourned  that  though  the  ideas  were 
many,  the  resulting  measures  were  few.  It 
is  the  woman's  eternal  complaint  against 
discussion  —  nothing  comes  of  it.  In  a 
32 


ON  THE  IMITATION   OF  MAN 

country  like  our  own,  where  reflection 
usually  follows  action,  the  woman's 
natural  mental  attitude  is  exaggerated. 
It  is  one  reason  why  we  have  so  few 
houses  where  there  is  anything  like  con- 
versation, why  with  us  the  salon  as 
an  institution  is  out  of  question.  The 
woman  wants  immediately  to  incorporate 
her  ideas.  She  is  not  interested  in  turn- 
ing them  over,  letting  her  mind  play  with 
them.  She  has  no  patience  with  other 
points  of  view  than  her  own.  They  are 
wrong  —  therefore  why  consider  them  ^ 
She  detests  uncertainties  —  questions 
which  cannot  be  settled.  Only  by  man 
and  the  rare  woman  is  it  accepted  that 
talk  is  a  good  enough  end  in  itself. 

The  strength  of  woman's  attack  on 
man's  life,  apart  from  the  essential  sound- 
ness of  the  impulse  which  drove  her  to 
make  it,  lay  then  in  its  directness  and 
practicality.     She    began    by    asking    to 

D  SS 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A   WOMAN 

be  educated  in  the  same  way  that  man 
educated  himself.  Preferably  she  would 
enter  his  classroom,  or  if  that  was  denied 
her,  she  would  follow  the  "just-as-good" 
curriculum  of  the  college  founded  for  her. 
In  the  last  sixty  or  seventy  years  tens  of 
thousands  of  women  have  been  students 
in  American  universities,  colleges,  and 
technical  schools,  taking  there  the  same 
training  as  men.  In  the  last  twenty 
years  the  annual  crescendo  of  numbers 
has  been  amazing;  over  ten  thousand 
at  the  beginning  of  the  period,  over  fifty- 
two  thousand  at  the  end.  Over  eight 
thousand  degrees  were  given  to  women  in 
1910,  nearly  half  as  many  as  were  given  to 
men.  Fully  four  fifths  of  these  women 
students  and  graduates  have  worked  side 
by  side  with  men  in  schools  which  served 
both  equally. 

Here,  then,  is  a  great  mass  of  experience 
from  which  it  would  seem  that  we  ought 
34 


ON  THE  IMITATION   OF  MAN 

to  be  able  to  say  precisely  how  the  intellects 
of  the  two  sexes  act  and  react  under  the 
stimulus  of  serious  study,  to  decide  defi- 
nitely whether  their  attack  on  problems 
is  the  same,  whether  they  come  out  the 
same.  Nevertheless,  he  would  be  a  rash 
observer  who  would  pretend  to  lay  down 
hard  -  and  -  fast  generalizations .  Assert 
whatever  you  will  as  to  the  mind  of 
woman  at  work  and  some  unimpeachable 
authority  will  rise  up  with  experience  that 
contradicts  you.  But  the  same  may  be 
said  of  the  mind  of  man.  The  mind —  per 
se  —  is  a  variable  and  disconcerting  organ. 

But  admitting  all  this  —  certain  gener- 
alizations, on  the  whole  correct,  may  be 
made  from  our  experience  with  coeduca- 
tion. 

One  of  the  first  of  these  is  that  at  the 

start  the  woman  takes  her  work  more 

seriously  than  her  masculine  competitor. 

Fifty  years  ago  there  was  special  reason 

35 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

for  this.  The  few  who  in  those  early 
days  sought  a  man's  education  had  some- 
thing of  the  spirit  of  pioneers.  They  had 
set  themselves  a  lofty  task:  to  prove 
themselves  the  equal  of  man  —  to  win 
privileges  which  they  believed  were  mali- 
ciously denied  their  sex.  The  spirit  with 
which  they  attacked  their  studies  was 
illumined  by  the  loftiness  of  their  aim. 
The  girl  who  enters  college  nowadays  has 
rarely  the  opportunity  to  be  either  pioneer 
or  martyr.  She  is  doing  what  has  come 
to  be  regarded  as  a  matter  of  course. 
Nevertheless,  to-day  as  then,  in  the  co- 
educational institution  she  is  more  con- 
sciously on  her  mettle  than  the  man. 

Her  attention,  interest,  respectfulness, 
docility,  will  be  ahead  of  his.  It  will  at 
once  be  apparent  that  she  carries  the 
larger  stock  of  untaught  knowledge.  In 
the  classroom  she  will  usually  outstep  him 
in  mathematics.  It  is  an  ideal  subject 
36 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

for  her,  satisfying  her  talent  for  order,  for 
making  things  "come  out  right."  Her 
memory  will  serve  her  better.  She  can 
depend  upon  it  to  carry  more  exceptions 
to  rules,  more  fantastic  irregular  verbs, 
more  dates,  more  lists  of  kings  and  queens, 
battles  and  generals,  and  on  the  whole  she 
will  treat  this  sort  of  impedimenta  with 
more  respect.  She  will  know  less  of 
abstract  ideas,  of  philosophies  and  specu- 
lations. They  will  interest  her  less.  The 
chances  are  that  she  will  be  less  skillful 
with  microscope  and  scalpel,  though  this 
is  not  certain.  She  will  show  less  en- 
thusiasm for  technical  problems,  for  ma- 
chinery and  engineering ;  more  for  social 
problems,  particularly  when  it  is  a  ques- 
tion of  meeting  them  with  preventives 
or  remedies.  In  the  first  two  or  three 
years  after  entering  college,  she  will 
almost  invariably  appear  superior  to  the 
men  of  her  age,  more  grown  up,  more 
87 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

interested,  surer  of  herself,  readier.  Later 
you  will  find  her  on  the  whole  less  in- 
clined to  experiment  with  her  gifts,  to 
feel  her  wings,  to  make  unexpected  dashes 
into  life.  It  begins  to  look  as  if  he  were 
the  experimenter,  she  the  conservator. 
And  by  the  time  she  is  a  senior,  look  out ! 
The  chances  are  she  will  have  less  interest 
from  now  on  with  man's  business  and 
more  with  her  own  !  In  any  case  she 
will  rarely  develop  as  rapidly  in  his  field 
from  this  point  as  he  is  doing. 

He  becomes  assertive,  confident,  domi- 
nating; the  male  taking  a  male's  place. 
He  discovers  that  his  intellectual  processes 
are  more  scientific  than  hers,  therefore  he 
concludes  they  are  superior.  He  finds 
he  can  outargue  her,  draw  logical  con- 
clusions as  she  cannot.  He  can  do  any- 
thing with  her  but  convince  her,  for  she 
jumps  the  process,  lands  on  her  con- 
clusion, and  there  she  sits.  Things  are 
38 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

so  because  they  are  so.  And  the  chances 
are  she  is  right,  in  spite  of  the  irregular 
way  she  got  there.  Something  superior 
to  reason  enters  into  her  operations  —  an 
intuition  of  truth  akin  to  inspiration. 
In  early  ages  women  unusually  endowed 
with  this  quality  of  perception  were 
honored  as  seers.  To-day  they  are 
recognized  as  counselors  of  prophetic 
wisdom.  "If  I  had  taken  my  wife's 
advice  !"     How  often  one  hears  it ! 

One  most  important  fact  has  come 
out  of  our  great  coeducational  experi- 
ment :  The  college  cannot  entirely  rub 
feminity  out  and  masculinity  into  a 
woman's  brain.  The  woman's  mind  is 
still  the  woman's  mind,  although  she  is 
usually  the  last  to  recognize  it.  It  is 
another  proof  of  the  eternal  fact  that 
Nature  looks  after  her  own  good  works  ! 

But  it  takes  more  than  a  college  course 
to  make  an  eflBcient,  flexible,  and  trust- 
39 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

worthy  organ  from  a  mind,  masculine 
or  feminine.  It  must  be  applied  to 
productive  labor  in  competition  with 
other  trained  minds,  before  you  can 
decide  what  it  is  worth.  Set  the  man- 
trained  woman's  mind  at  what  is  called 
man's  business,  let  it  be  what  you  will  — 
keeping  a  shop,  practicing  medicine  or 
law,  editing,  running  a  factory  —  let 
her  do  it  in  what  she  considers  to  be  a 
man's  way,  and  with  fidelity  to  her 
original  theory  that  his  way  is  more 
desirable  than  hers;  that  is,  let  her 
succeed  in  the  task  of  making  a  man  of 
herself  —  what  about  her  ?  —  what  kind 
of  a  man  does  she  become  ? 

Here  again  there  is  ample  experience 
to  go  on.  For  seventy  years  we  have  had 
them  with  us  —  the  stern  disciples  of  the 
militant  program.  Greater  fidelity  to  a 
task  than  they  show  it  would  be  impossible 
to  find  —  a  fidelity  so  unwavering  that 
40 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

it  is  often  painful.  Their  care  for  detail, 
for  order,  for  exactness,  is  endless.  Dig- 
nity, respect  for  their  undertaking,  de- 
votion to  professional  etiquette  they  may 
be  counted  on  to  show  in  the  highest 
degree.  These  are  admirable  qualities. 
They  have  led  hundreds  of  women  into 
independence  and  good  service.  Almost 
never,  however,  have  they  led  one  to 
the  top.  In  free  fields  such  as  mer- 
chandising, editing,  and  manufacturing  we 
have  yet  to  produce  a  woman  of  the  first 
cahber;  that  is,  daring,  experimenting, 
free  from  prejudice,  with  a  vision  of  the 
future  great  enough  to  lead  her  to  embody 
something  of  the  future  in  her  task. 

In  every  profession  we  have  scores  of 
successful  women  —  almost  never  a  great 
woman,  and  yet  the  world  is  full  of 
great  women  !  That  is,  of  women  who 
understand,  are  famihar  with  the  big 
sacrifices,  appreciative  of  the  fine  things, 
41 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

far-seeing,  prophetic.  Why  does  this 
greatness  so  rarely  find  expression  in 
their  professional  undertakings  ? 

The  answer  is  no  doubt  complex,  but 
one  factor  is  the  general  notion  of  the 
woman  that  if  she  succeeds  she  must 
suppress  her  natural  emotions  and  meet 
the  world  with  a  surface  as  non-resilient 
as  she  conceives  that  of  man  to  be  in 
his  dealings  with  the  world.  She  is 
strengthened  in  this  notion  by  hard  neces- 
sity. No  woman  could  live  and  respond 
as  freely  as  her  nature  prompts  to  the 
calls  on  her  sympathy  which  come  in 
the  contact  with  all  conditions  of  life  in- 
volved in  practicing  a  trade  or  a  pro- 
fession. She  must  save  herself.  To  do 
it  she  incases  herself  in  an  unnatural 
armor.  For  the  normal,  healthy  woman 
this  means  the  suppression  of  what  is 
strongest  in  her  nature,  that  power  which 
differentiates  her  chiefly  from  man,  her 
42 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

power  of  emotion,  her  "affectability" 
as  the  scientists  call  it.  She  must  over- 
come her  own  nature,  put  it  in  bonds, 
cripple  it,  if  she  is  to  do  her  work.  Here 
is  a  fundamental  reason  for  the  failure 
of  woman  to  reach  the  first  rank.  She 
has  sacrificed  the  most  wonderful  part 
of  her  endowment,  that  which  when 
trained  gives  her  vision,  sharpens  her 
intuitions,  reveals  the  need  and  the 
true  course.  This  superior  affectability 
crushed,  leaves  her  atrophied. 

The  common  characterization  of  this 
atrophied  woman  is  that  she  is  "cold." 
It  is  the  exact  word.  She  is  cold,  also 
she  is  self-centered  and  intensely  per- 
sonal. Let  a  woman  make  success  in  a 
trade  or  profession  her  exclusive  and 
sufficient  ambition,  and  the  result,  though 
it  may  be  brilliant,  is  repellent. 

She  gives  to  her  task  an  altogether 
disproportionate  place  in  her  scheme  of 
43 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

things.  Life  is  not  made  by  work,  im- 
portant as  is  work  in  life.  Human  nature 
has  varied  needs.  It  calls  imperatively 
for  a  task,  something  to  do  with  brain 
and  hands  —  a  productive  something 
which  fits  the  common  good,  without 
which  the  world  would  not  be  as  orderly 
and  as  happy.  Say  what  we  will,  it 
matters  very  little  what  the  task  is  — 
if  it  contributes  in  some  fashion  to  this 
superior  orderhness  and  happiness.  But 
it  means  more.  It  means  leisure,  pleasure, 
excitements ;  it  means  feeding  of  the 
taste,  the  curiosity,  the  emotions,  the 
reflective  powers;  and  it  means  love, 
love  of  the  mate,  the  child,  the  friend, 
and  neighbor.  It  means  reverence  for 
the  scheme  of  things  and  one's  place  in 
it ;  worship  of  the  author  of  it,  religion. 
But  the  woman  sternly  set  to  do  a 
man's  business,  believing  it  better  than 
the  woman's,  too  often  views  life  as  made 
44 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

up  of  business.  She  throws  her  whole 
nature  to  the  task.  Her  work  is  her 
child.  She  gives  it  the  same  exclusive 
passionate  attention.  She  is  as  fiercely 
jealous  of  interference  in  it  as  she  would 
be  if  it  were  a  child.  She  resents  sug- 
gestions and  change.  It  is  hers,  a  per- 
sonal thing  to  which  she  clings  as  if  it 
were  a  living  being.  That  attitude  is  the 
chief  reason  why  working  with  women  in 
the  development  of  great  undertakings 
is  as  diflScult  as  cooperating  with  them 
in  the  rearing  of  a  family.  It  is  also  a 
reason  why  they  rarely  rise  to  the  first 
rank.  They  cannot  get  away  from  their 
undertakings  suflSciently  to  see  the  big 
truths  and  movements  which  are  always 
impersonal. 

Brilliant  and  satisfying  as  her  triumph 

may  be  to  her  personally,  she  frequently 

finds  that  it  is  resented  by  nature  and  by 

society.     She  finds  that  nature  lays  pit- 

45 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A   WOMAN 

falls  for  her,  cracks  the  ice  of  her  heart 
and  sets  it  aflame,  often  for  absurd  and 
unworthy  causes.  She  finds  that  the 
great  mass  of  unconscious  women  com- 
miserate or  scorn  her  as  one  who  has 
missed  the  fullness  of  life.  She  finds 
that  society  regards  her  as  one  who 
shirked  the  task  of  life,  and  who,  there- 
fore, should  not  be  honored  as  the  woman 
who  has  stood  up  to  the  common  burden. 
When  she  senses  this  —  which  is  not 
always  —  she  treats  it  as  prejudice.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  antagonism  of  Nature 
and  Society  to  the  militant  woman  is 
less  prejudice  than  seK-defense.  It  is 
a  protest  against  the  wastefulness  and 
sacrifice  of  her  career.  It  is  a  right 
saving  impulse  to  prevent  perversion 
of  the  quahties  and  powers  of  women 
which  are  most  needed  in  the  world, 
those  qualities  and  powers  which  differen- 
tiate her  from  man,  which  make  for  the 
46 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

variety,  the  fullness,  the  charm,  and 
interest  of  life. 

Moreover,  Nature  and  Society  must 
not  permit  her  triumph  to  appear  de- 
sirable to  the  young.  They  must  be 
made  to  understand  what  her  winnings 
have  cost  in  lovely  and  desirable  things. 
They  must  know  that  the  unrest  which 
drove  her  to  the  attempt  is  not  necessarily 
satisfied  by  her  triumph,  that  it  is  merely 
stifled  and  may  break  out  at  any  time  in 
vagaries  and  folHes.  They  must  be  made 
to  realize  the  essential  barrenness  of  her 
triumph,  its  lack  of  the  savor  and  tang 
of  life,  the  multitude  of  makeshifts  she 
must  practice  to  recompense  her  for  the 
lack  of  the  great  adventure  of  natural 
living. 

And  they  see  it,  many  of  them,  before 

they  are  out  of  college,  and  their  militancy 

falls   off  like  the  cloak  it  generally   is. 

The   girl   abandons   her   quest.     In   the 

47 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

early  days  she  was  likely  to  be  treated 
as  an  apostate  if,  instead  of  following 
the  "life  work"  she  had  picked  out,  she 
slipped  back  into  matrimony.  I  can 
remember  the  dismay  among  certain 
militant  friends  when  Alice  Freeman 
married.  "Our  first  college  .president,'* 
they  groaned.  *'A  woman  who  so  vin- 
dicated the  sex."  It  was  like  the  griev- 
ing of  Miss  Anthony  that  Mrs.  Stanton 
wasted  so  much  time  having  babies  ! 

The  militant  theory,  as  originally  con- 
ceived, instead  of  increasing  in  favor, 
has  declined.  There  is  little  likelihood 
now  that  any  great  number  of  women 
will  ever  regard  it  as  a  desirable  working 
formula  for  more  than  a  short  period 
of  their  lives.  But  I  am  not  saying 
that  this  theory  is  no  longer  influential. 
It  is  probable  that  in  a  modified  form 
it  was  never  more  influential  than 
it  is  to-day.  For,  while  the  Uneasy 
48 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

Woman  has  practically  demonstrated  that 
"making  a  man  of  herself"  does  not 
solve  her  problem,  she  has  by  no  means 
given  up  the  notion  that  the  Business  of 
Being  a  Woman  is  narrowing  and  unsat- 
isfying. Nor  has  she  ceased  to  consider 
man's  life  more  desirable  than  woman's. 

The  present  effort  of  the  serious-minded 
to  meet  the  case  takes  two  general  direc- 
tions, natural  enough  outgrowths  of  the 
original  militancy.  The  first  of  these 
is  a  frank  advocacy  of  celibacy.  ^'^  Celi- 
bacy is  the  aristocracy  of  the  future"  is 
the  preaching  of  one  European  feminist. 
It  is  a  modification  of  the  scheme  by 
which  the  medieval  woman  sought  to 
escape  unrest.  Four  hundred  years  ago 
a  woman  sought  celibacy  as  an  escape 
from  sin ;  service  and  righteousness  were 
her  aim.  To-day  she  adopts  it  to  escape 
inferiority  and  servitude ;  superiority  and 
freedom  her  aim. 

B  49 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

The  ranks  of  the  woman  celibates  are 
not  full.  Many  a  candidate  falls  out  by 
the  way,  confronted  by  something  she 
had  not  reckoned  with  —  the  eternal 
command  that  she  be  a  woman.  She 
compromises — grudgingly.  She  will  be  a 
woman  on  condition  that  she  is  guaran- 
teed economic  freedom,  opportunity  for 
self -expressive  work,  political  recognition. 
What  this  amounts  to  is  that  she  does 
not  see  in  the  woman's  life  a  satisfying 
and  permanent  end.  There  are  various 
points  at  which  she  claims  it  fails.  It  is 
antagonistic  to  personal  ambition.  It 
makes  a  dependent  of  her.  It  leaves  her 
in  middle  life  without  an  occupation. 
It  keeps  her  out  of  the  great  movements 
of  her  day  —  gives  her  no  part  in  the 
solution  of  the  ethical  and  economical 
problems  which  affect  her  and  her  chil- 
dren. She  declares  that  she  wants  fuller 
participation  in  life,  and  by  life  she 
50 


ON  THE  IMITATION  OF  MAN 

seems  to  mean  the  elaborate  machinery 
by  which  human  wants  are  supplied  and 
human  beings  kept  in  something  like 
order;  the  movements  of  the  market 
place,  of  politics,  and  of  government. 

Now  if  there  were  not  something  in 
her  contention,  the  Uneasy  Woman  would 
not  be  with  us  as  she  is  to-day,  more 
vociferous,  more  insistent  than  ever  in 
the  world's  history.  What  is  there  in 
her  case  ? 

If  the  cultivation  of  individual  tastes 
and  talents  to  a  useful,  productive  point 
is  out  of  question  in  the  woman's  business, 
if  it  is  not  a  part  of  it,  something  is  weak 
in  the  scheme.  Something  is  weak  if 
the  woman  is  or  feels  that  she  is  not  pay- 
ing her  way.  Both  are  not  only  individ- 
ual rights ;  they  are  individual  duties. 

Moreover,  she  is  certainly  right  to  be 
dissatisfied,  if,  after  spending  twenty-five 
years,  more  or  less,  she  is  to  be  left  in 
51 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

middle  life,  her  forces  spent,  without 
interests  and  obligations  which  will  oc- 
cupy brain  and  heart  to  the  full,  without 
important  tasks  which  are  the  logical 
outcome  of  her  experience  and  which 
she  must  carry  on  in  order  to  complete 
that  experience. 

But  what  is  the  truth  about  it  ?  What 
is  the  Business  of  Being  a  Woman  ?  Is 
it  something  incompatible  with  free  and 
joyous  development  of  one's  talents? 
Is  there  no  place  in  it  for  economic 
independence  ?  Has  it  no  essential  re- 
lation to  the  world's  movements  ?  Is 
it  an  episode  which  drains  the  forces 
and  leaves  a  dreary  wreck  behind  ?  Is 
it  something  that  cannot  be  organized 
into  a  profession  of  dignity,  and  oppor- 
tunity for  service  and  for  happiness? 


52 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  BUSINESS  OF   BEING   A   WOMAN 

Respect  for  the  Creator  of  this  world 
is  basic  among  all  civilized  people.  The 
longer  one  lives,  the  more  thoroughly 
one  realizes  the  soundness  of  this  respect. 
The  earth  and  its  works  are  good.  Most 
human  conceptions  are  barred  by  strange 
inconsistencies.  The  man  who  praises 
the  works  of  the  Creator  as  all  wise  not 
infrequently  treats  His  arrangement  for 
carrying  on  the  race  as  if  it  were  unfit 
to  be  spoken  of  in  polite  society.  No- 
where does  the  modern  God-fearing 
man  come  nearer  to  sacrilege  than  in 
his  attitude  toward  the  divine  plan  for 
renewing  life. 

A  strange  mixture  of  sincerity  and 
58 


THE   BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

hypocrisy,  self-flagellation  and  lust,  as- 
piration and  superstition,  has  gone  into 
the  making  of  this  attitude.  With  the 
development  of  it  we  have  nothing  to  do 
here.  What  does  concern  us  is  the  effect 
of  this  profanity  on  the  Business  of 
Being  a  Woman. 

The  central  fact  of  the  woman's  life  — 
Nature's  reason  for  her  —  is  the  child, 
his  bearing  and  rearing.  There  is  no 
escape  from  the  divine  order  that  her 
life  must  be  built  around  this  constraint, 
duty,  or  privilege,  as  she  may  please  to 
consider  it.  But  from  the  beginning  to 
the  end  of  life  she  is  never  permitted 
to  treat  it  naturally  and  frankly.  As 
a  child  accepting  all  that  opens  to  her  as 
a  matter  of  course,  she  is  steered  away 
from  it  as  if  it  were  something  evil.  Her 
first  essays  at  evasion  and  spying  often 
come  to  her  in  connection  with  facts 
which  are  sacred  and  beautiful  and  which 
54 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

she  is  perfectly  willing  to  accept  as  such 
if  they  were  treated  intelligently  and 
reverently.  If  she  could  be  kept  from 
all  knowledge  of  the  procession  of  new 
life  except  as  Nature  reveals  it  to  her,  there 
would  be  reason  in  her  treatment.  But 
this  is  impossible.  From  babyhood  she 
breathes  the  atmosphere  of  unnatural 
prejudices  and  misconceptions  which  en- 
velop the  fact. 

Throughout  her  girlhood  the  atmosphere 
grows  thicker.  She  finally  faces  the  most 
perilous  and  beautiful  of  experiences  with 
little  more  than  the  ideas  which  have 
come  to  her  from  the  confidences  of  evil- 
minded  servants,  inquisitive  and  im- 
aginative playmates,  or  the  gossip  she 
overhears  in  her  mother's  society.  Every 
other  matter  of  her  life,  serious  and 
commonplace,  has  received  careful  atten- 
tion, but  here  she  has  been  obliged  to 
feel  her  way  and,  worst  of  abominations, 
55 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

to  feel  it  with  an  inner  fear  that  she 
ought  not  to  know  or  seek  to  know. 

If  there  were  no  other  reason  for  the 
modern  woman's  revolt  against  marriage, 
the  usual  attitude  toward  its  central 
facts  would  be  sufficient.  The  idea  that 
celibacy  for  woman  is  "the  aristocracy 
of  the  future"  is  soundly  based  if  the 
Business  of  Being  a  Woman  rests  on  a 
mystery  so  questionable  that  it  cannot 
be  frankly  and  truthfully  explained  by  a 
girl's  mother  at  the  moment  her  interest 
and  curiosity  seeks  satisfaction.  That 
she  gets  on  as  well  as  she  does,  results,  of 
course,  from  the  essential  soundness  of 
the  girl's  nature,  the  armor  of  modesty, 
right  instinct,  and  reverence  with  which 
she  is  endowed. 

The  direst   result   of  ignorance  or  of 

distorted  ideas  of  this  tremendous  matter 

of  carrying  on  human  life  is  that  it  leaves 

the    girl    unconscious    of    the    supreme 

56 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

importance  of  her  mate.  So  heedlessly 
and  ignorantly  is  our  mating  done  to-day 
that  the  huge  machinery  of  Church  and 
State  and  the  tremendous  power  of  public 
opinion  combined  have  been  insufficient 
to  preserve  to  the  institution  of  marriage 
anything  like  the  stability  it  once  had, 
or  that  it  is  desirable  that  it  should  have, 
if  its  full  possibilities  are  to  be  realized. 
The  immorality  and  inhumanity  of  com- 
pelling the  obviously  mismated  to  live 
together,  grow  on  society.  Divorce  and 
separation  are  more  and  more  tolerated. 
Yet  little  is  done  to  prevent  the  hasty 
and  ill-considered  mating  which  is  at  the 
source  of  the  trouble. 

Rarely  has  a  girl  a  sound  and  informed 
sense  to  guide  her  in  accepting  her 
companion.  The  corollary  of  this  bad 
proposition  is  that  she  has  no  sufficient 
idea  of  the  seriousness  of  her  undertaking. 
She  starts  out  as  if  on  a  lifelong  joyous 
57 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

holiday,  primarily  devised  for  her  personal 
happiness.  And  what  is  happiness  in 
her  mind  ?  Certainly  it  is  not  a  good  to 
be  conquered  —  a  state  of  mind  wrested 
from  life  by  tackling  and  mastering  its 
varied  experiences,  the  end,  not  the 
beginning,  of  a  great  journey.  Too  often 
it  is  that  of  the  modern  Uneasy  Woman  — 
the  attainment  of  something  outside  of 
herself.  She  visualizes  it,  as  possessions, 
as  ease,  a  "good  time,"  opportunities  for 
self-culture,  the  exclusive  devotion  of 
the  mate  to  her.  Rarely  does  she  under- 
stand that  happiness  in  her  undertaking 
depends  upon  the  wisdom  and  sense  with 
which  she  conquers  a  succession  of  hard 
places  —  calling  for  readjustment  of  her 
ideas  and  sacrifice  of  her  desires.  All  this 
she  must  discover  for  herself.  She  is  like  ; 
a  voyager  who  starts  out  on  a  great  sea  ; 
with  no  other  chart  than  a  sailor's 
yarns,  no  other  compass  than  curiosity.  , 
58  .,■ 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

The  budget  of  axioms  she  brings  to 
her  guidance  she  has  picked  up  helter- 
skelter.  They  are  the  crumbs  gathered 
from  the  table  of  the  Uneasy  Woman, 
or  worse,  of  the  pharisaical  and  satisfied 
woman,  from  good  and  bad  books,  from 
newspaper  exploitations  of  divorce  and 
scandal,  from  sly  gossip  with  girls  whose 
budget  of  marital  wisdom  is  as  higgledy- 
piggledy  as  her  own. 

And  a  pathetically  trivial  budget  it 
is :  — 

"He  must  tell  her  everything."  "He 
must'  always  pick  up  what  she  drops." 
"He  must  dress  for  dinner."  "He 
must  remember  her  birthday."  That 
is,  she  begins  her  adventure  with  a  set  of 
hard-and-fast  rules, — and  nothing  in  this 
life  causes  more  mischief  than  the  effort  to 
force  upon  another  one's  own  rules  ! 

That  marriage  gives  the  finest  oppor- 
tunity that  life  affords  for  practicing, 
59 


THE  BUSINESS   OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

not  rules,  but  principles,  she  has  never 
been  taught.  Flexibility,  adaptation, 
fair-mindedness,  the  habit  of  supple- 
menting the  weakness  of  the  one  by 
the  strength  of  the  other,  all  the  fine 
things  upon  which  the  beauty,  durability, 
and  growth  of  human  relations  depend, 

—  these  are  what  decide  the  future  of 
her  marriage.  These  she  misses  while 
she  insists  on  her  rules ;  and  ruin  is  often 
the  end.  Study  the  causes  back  of 
divorces  and  separations,  the  brutal 
criminal  causes  aside,  and  one  finds 
that  usually  they  begin  in  trivial  things, 

—  an  irritating  habit  or  an  offensive 
opinion  persisted  in  on  the  one  side  and 
not  endured  philosophically  on  the  other ; 
a  petty  selfishness  indulged  on  the  one 
side  and  not  accepted  humorously  on  the 
other,  —  that  is,  the  marriage  is  made  or 
unmade  by  small,  not  great,  things. 

It  is  a  lack  of  any  serious  consideration 
60 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

of  the  nature  of  the  undertaking  she  is 
going  into  which  permits  her  at  the  start 
to  accept  a  false  notion  of  her  economic 
position.  She  agrees  that  she  is  being 
"supported";  she  consents  to  accept 
what  is  given  her;  she  even  consents  to 
ask  for  money.  Men  and  society  at 
large  take  her  at  her  own  valuation. 
Loose  thinking  by  those  who  seek  to  in- 
fluence public  opinion  has  aggravated 
the  trouble.  They  start  with  the  idea 
that  she  is  a  parasite  —  does  not  pay  her 
way.  *'Men  hunt,  fish,  keep  the  cattle, 
or  raise  corn,"  says  a  popular  writer,  "for 
women  to  eat  the  game,  the  fish,  the  meat, 
and  the  corn."  The  inference  is  that 
the  men  alone  render  useful  service. 
But  neither  man  nor  woman  eats  of  these 
things  until  the  woman  has  prepared 
them.  The  theory  that  the  man  who 
raises  corn  does  a  more  important  piece 
of  work  than  the  woman  who  makes  it 

m 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

into  bread  is  absurd.  The  theory  that 
she  does  something  more  difficult  and  less 
interesting  is  equally  absurd. 

The  practice  of  handing  over  the  pay 
envelope  at  the  end  of  the  week  to 
the  woman,  so  common  among  laboring 
people,  is  a  recognition  of  her  equal 
economic  function.  It  is  a  recognition 
that  the  venture  of  the  two  is  common 
and  that  its  success  depends  as  much 
on  the  care  and  intelligence  with  which 
she  spends  the  money  as  it  does  on  the 
energy  and  steadiness  with  which  he  earns 
it.  Whenever  one  or  the  other  fails, 
trouble  begins.  The  failure  to  under- 
stand this  business  side  of  the  marriage 
relation  almost  inevitably  produces  hu- 
miliation and  irritation.  So  serious  has 
the  strain  become  because  of  this  false 
start  that  various  devices  have  been 
suggested  to  repair  it  —  Mr.  Wells '  "  Paid 
Motherhood"  is  one;  weekly  wages  as 
62 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

for  a  servant  is  another.  Both  notions 
encourage  the  primary  mistake  that  the 
woman  has  not  an  equal  economic  place 
with  the  man  in  the  marriage. 

Marriage  is  a  business  as  well  as  a 
sentimental  partnership.  But  a  business 
partnership  brings  grave  practical  re- 
sponsibilities, and  this,  under  our  present 
system,  the  girl  is  rarely  trained  to  face. 
She  becomes  a  partner  in  an  undertaking 
where  her  function  is  spending.  The 
probability  is  she  does  not  know  a  credit 
from  a  debit,  has  to  learn  to  make  out 
a  check  correctly,  and  has  no  conscience 
about  the  fundamental  matter  of  living 
within  the  allowance  which  can  be  set 
aside  for  the  family  expenses.  When  this 
is  true  of  her,  she  at  once  puts  herself 
into  the  rank  of  an  incompetent  —  she 
becomes  an  economic  dependent.  She 
has  laid  the  foundation  for  becoming 
an  Uneasy  Woman. 
63 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

^  It  is  common  enough  to  hear  women 
arguing  that  this  close  grappHng  with 
household  economy  is  narrowing,  not 
worthy  of  them.  Why  keeping  track 
of  the  cost  of  eggs  and  butter  and  calcu- 
lating how  much  your  income  will  allow 
you  to  buy  is  any  more  narrowing  than 
keeping  track  of  the  cost  and  quality 
of  cotton  or  wool  or  iron  and  calculating 
how  much  a  mill  requires,  it  is  hard  to 
see.  It  is  the  same  kind  of  a  problem. 
Moreover,  it  has  the  added  interest  of 
being  always  an  independent  'personal 
problem.  Most  men  work  under  the 
deadening  effect  of  impersonal  routine. 
They  do  that  which  others  have  planned 
and  for  results  in  which  they  have  no 
permanent  share. 

y  But  the  woman  argues  that  her  task 
has  no  relation  to  the  state.  Her  failure 
to  see  that  relation  costs  this  coun- 
try heavily.  Her  concern  is  with 
64 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

retail  prices.  If  she  does  her  work  in- 
telligently, she  follows  and  studies  every 
fluctuation  of  price  in  standards.  She 
also  knows  whether  she  is  receiving  the 
proper  quality  and  quantity;  and  yet 
so  poorly  have  women  discharged  these 
obligations  that  dealers  for  years  have 
been  able  to  manipulate  prices  practi- 
cally to  please  themselves,  and  as  for 
quality  and  quantity  we  have  the  scandal 
of  American  woolen  goods,  of  food  adul- 
teration, of  false  weights  and  measures. 
No  one  of  these  things  could  have  come 
about  in  this  country  if  woman  had 
taken  her  business  as  a  consumer  with 
anything  like  the  seriousness  with  which 
man  takes  his  as  a  producer. 
l-^  Her  ignorance  in  handling  the  prod- 
ucts of  industry  has  helped  the  monop- 
olistically  inclined  trust  enormously.  I 
can  remember  the  day  when  the  Beef  Trust 
invaded  a  certain  Middle  Western  town, 
r  65 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

The  war  on  the  old-time  butchers  of 
the  village  was  open.  "Buy  of  us," 
was  the  order,  "or  we'll  fill  the  storage 
house  so  full  that  the  legs  of  the  steers 
will  hang  out  of  the  windows,  and  we'll 
give  away  the  meat."  The  women  of 
the  town  had  a  prosperous  club  which 
might  have  resisted  the  tyranny  which 
the  members  all  deplored,  but  the  club 
was  busy  that  winter  with  the  study  of 
the  Greek  drama  !  They  deplored  the 
tyranny,  but  they  bought  the  cut-rate 
meat  —  the  old  butchers  fought  to  a 
finish,  and  the  housekeepers  are  now 
paying  higher  prices  for  poorer  meat 
and  railing  at  the  impotency  of  man  in 
breaking  up  the  Beef  Trust  ! 
/^  ~lf  two  years  ago  when  the  question  of  a 
higher  duty  on  hosiery  was  before  Con- 
gress any  woman  or  club  of  women  had 
come  forward  with  carefully  tabulated 
experiments,  showing  exactly  the  changes 
66 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

which  have  gone  on  of  late  years  in  the 
shape,  color,  and  wearing  quality  of 
the  15-,  25-,  and  50-cent  stockings,  the 
stockings  of  the  poor,  she  would  have 
rendered  a  genuine  economic  service.  The 
women  held  mass  meetings  and  prepared 
petitions  instead,  using  on  the  one  side 
the  information  the  shopkeepers  fur- 
nished, on  the  other  that  which  the  stock- 
ing manufacturers  furnished.  Agitation 
based  upon  anything  but  personal  knowl- 
ledge  is  not  a  public  service.  It  may  be 
easily  a  grave  public  danger.  The  facts 
needed  for  fixing  the  hosiery  duty  the 
women  should  have  furnished,  for  they 
buy  the  stockings. 

If  the  Uneasy  American  Woman  were 
really  fulfilling  her  economic  functions 
to-day,  she  would  never  allow  a  short 
pound  of  butter,  a  yard  of  adulterated 
woolen  goods,  to  come  into  her  home. 
She  would  never  buy  a  ready-made 
67 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

garment  which   did  not  bear  the  label 

j  of  the  Consumer's  League.     She  would 

/  recognize    that    she    is    a    guardian    of 

quality,   honesty,   and   humanity   in   in- 

V  dustry.  _^ 

A  persistent  misconception  of  the  na- 
ture and  the  possibilities  of  this  practi- 
cal side  of  the  Business  of  Being  a  Woman 
runs  through  all  present-day  discussions 
of  the  changes  in  household  economy. 
The  woman  no  longer  has  a  chance 
to  pay  her  way,  we  are  told,  because  it  is 
really  cheaper  to  buy  bread  than  to  bake 
it,  to  buy  jam  than  to  put  it  up.  Of 
course,  this  is  a  part  of  the  vicious  notion 
that  a  woman  only  makes  an  economic 
return  by  the  manual  labor  she  does. 
The  Uneasy  Woman  takes  up  the  point 
and  complains  that  she  has  nothing  to 
do.  But  this  release  from  certain  kinds 
of  labor  once  necessary,  merely  puts 
upon  her  the  obligation  to  apply  the 
68 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

ingenuity  and  imagination  necessary  to 
make  her  business  meet  the  changes  of 
an  ever  changing  world.  Because  the 
conditions  under  which  a  household  must 
be  run  now  are  not  what  they  were  fifty 
years  ago  is  no  proof  that  the  woman  no 
longer  has  here  an  important  field  of  labor. 
There  is  more  to  the  practical  side  of 
her  business  than  preparing  food  for  the 
family !  It  means,  for  one  thing,  the 
directing  of  its  wants.  The  success  of  a 
household  lies  largely  in  its  power  of 
selection.  To-day  selection  has  given 
way  to  accumulation.  The  family  be- 
comes too  often  an  incorporated  company 
for  getting  things  —  with  frightful  results. 
The  woman  holds  the  only  strong  strate- 
gic position  from  which  to  war  on  this 
tendency,  as  well  as  on  the  habits  of 
wastefulness  which  are  making  our  na- 
tional life  increasingly  hard  and  ugly. 
She  is  so  positioned  that  she  can  cultivate 
69 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

and  enforce  simplicity  and  thrift,  the 
two  habits  which  make  most  for  elegance 
and  for  satisfaction  in  the  material  things 
of  life. 

Whenever  a  woman  does  master  this 
economic  side  of  her  business  in  a  manner 
worthy  of  its  importance,  she  establishes 
the  most  effective  school  for  teaching 
thrift,  quality,  management,  selection  — 
all  the  factors  in  the  economic  problem. 
Such  scientific  household  management 
is  the  rarest  kind  of  a  training  school. 
And  here  we  touch  the  most  vital  part 
in  the  Woman's  Business  —  that  of  educa- 
tion. 

Every  home  is  perforce  a  good  or  bad 
educational  center.  It  does  its  work  in 
spite  of  every  effort  to  shirk  or  supplement 
it.  No  teacher  can  entirely  undo  what  it 
does,  be  that  good  or  bad.  The  natural 
joyous  opening  of  a  child's  mind  depends 
on  its  first  intimate  relations.  These  are, 
70 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

as  a  rule,  with  the  mother.  It  is  the 
mother  who  "takes  an  interest,"  who 
oftenest  decides  whether  the  new  mind 
shall  open  frankly  and  fearlessly.  How 
she  does  her  work,  depends  less  upon  her 
ability  to  answer  questions  than  her 
effort  not  to  discourage  them;  less  upon 
her  ability  to  lead  authoritatively  into 
great  fields  than  her  efforts  to  push  the 
child  ahead  into  those  which  attract  him. 
To  be  responsive  to  his  interests  is  the 
woman's  greatest  contribution  to  the 
child's  development. 

I  remember  a  call  once  made  on  me  by 
two  little  girls  when  our  time  was  spent 
in  an  excited  discussion  of  the  parts  of 
speech.  They  were  living  facts  to  them, 
as  real  as  if  their  discovery  had  been 
printed  that  morning  for  the  first  time 
in  the  newspaper.  I  was  interested  to 
find  who  it  was  that  had  been  able  to 
keep  their  minds  so  naturally  alive.  I 
71 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

found  that  it  came  from  the  family  habit 
of  treating  with  respect  whatever  each 
child  turned  up.  Nothing  was  slurred 
over  as  if  it  had  no  relation  to  life  —  not 
even  the  parts  of  speech  !  They  were 
not  asked  or  forced  to  load  themselves 
up  with  baggage  in  which  they  soon 
discovered  their  parents  had  no  interest. 
Everything  was  treated  as  if  it  had  a 
permanent  place  in  the  scheme  to  which 
they  were  being  introduced.  It  is  only 
in  some  such  relation  that  the  natural 
bent  of  most  children  can  flower,  that 
they  can  come  early  to  themselves. 
Where  this  warming,  nourishing  intimacy 
is  wanting,  where  the  child  is  turned  over 
to  schools  to  be  put  through  the  mass 
drill  which  numbers  make  imperative  — 
it  is  impossible  for  the  most  intelligent 
teacher  to  do  a  great  deal  to  help  the 
child  to  his  own.  What  the  Uneasy 
Woman  forgets  is  that  no  two  children 
72 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

born  were  ever  alike,  and  no  two  children 
who  grow  to  manhood  and  womanhood 
will  ever  live  the  same  life.  The  effort 
to  make  one  child  like  another,  to  make 
him  what  his  parents  want,  not  what  he  is 
born  to  be,  is  one  of  the  most  cruel  and 
wasteful  in  society.  It  is  the  woman's 
business  to  prevent  this. 
\/^'L\i^  Uneasy  Woman  tells  you  that 
this  close  attention  to  the  child  is  too 
confining,  too  narrowing.  "I  will  pity 
Mrs.  Jones  for  the  hugeness  of  her  task," 
says  Chesterton;  "I  will  never  pity  her 
for  its  smallness."  A  woman  never  lived 
who  did  all  she  might  have  done  to  open 
the  mind  of  her  child  for  its  great  ad- 
venture. It  is  an  exhaustless  task.  The 
woman  who  sees  it  knows  she  has 
need  of  all  the  education  the  college  can 
give,  all  the  experience  and  culture  she 
can  gather.  She  knows  that  the  fuller  her 
individual  life,  the  broader  her  interests, 
73 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

the  better  for  the  child.  She  should  be 
a  person  in  his  eyes.  The  real  service 
of  the  "higher  education,"  the  freedom 
to  take  a  part  in  whatever  interests  or 
stimulates  her  —  lies  in  the  fact  that  it 
fits  her  intellectually  to  be  a  companion 
worthy  of  a  child.  She  should  know 
that  unless  she  does  this  thing  for  him 
he  goes  forth  with  his  mind  still  in  swad- 
dling clothes,  with  the  chances  that  it  will 
not  be  released  until  relentless  life  tears 
off  the  bands. 

The  progress  of  society  depends  upon 
getting  out  of  men  and  women  an  in- 
creasing amount  of  the  powers  with 
which  they  are  born  and  which  bad  sur- 
roundings at  the  start  blunt  or  stupefy. 
This  is  what  all  systems  of  education 
try  to  do,  but  the  result  of  all  systems 
of  education  depends  upon  the  material 
that  comes  to  the  educator.  Opening 
the  mind  of  the  child,  that  is  the  delicate 
74 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

task  the  state  asks  of  the  mother,  and 
the  quality  of  the  future  state  depends 
upon  the  way  she  discharges  this  part 
of  her  business. 

I  think  it  is  historically  correct  to  say 
that  the  reason  of  the  sudden  and  revo- 
lutionary change  in  the  education  of 
American  women,  which  began  with  the 
nineteenth  century  and  continued  through 
it,  was  the  realization  that  if  we  were  to 
make  real  democrats,  we  must  begin 
with  the  child,  and  if  we  began  with  the 
child,  we  must  begin  with  the  mother  ! 

Everybody  saw  that  unless  the  child 
learned  by  example  and  precept  the 
great  principles  of  liberty,  equality,  and 
fraternity,  he  was  going  to  remain  what  by 
nature  we  all  are,  —  imperious,  demand- 
ing, and  self-seeking.  The  whole  scheme 
must  fail  if  his  education  failed.  It  is 
not  too  much  to  say  that  the  success  of 
the  Declaration  of  Independence  and  the 
75 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Constitution  depended,  in  the  minds  of 
certain  early  Democrats,  upon  the  woman. 
The  doctrines  of  these  great  instruments 
would  be  worked  out  according  to  the 
way  she  played  her  part.  Her  serious 
responsibility  came  in  the  fact  that  her 
work  was  one  that  nobody  could  take  off 
her  hands.  This  responsibility  required 
a  preparation  entirely  different  from  that 
which  had  been  hers.  She  must  be 
given  education  and  liberty.  The  woman 
saw  this,  and  the  story  of  her  efforts 
to  secure  both,  that  she  might  meet 
the  requirements,  is  one  of  the  noblest 
in  history.  There  was  no  doubt,  then, 
as  to  the  value  of  the  tasks,  no  question 
as  to  their  being  worthy  national  obliga- 
tions. It  was  a  question  of  fitting  herself 
for  them. 

But  what  has  happened  ?    In  the  pro- 
cess of  preparing  herself  to  discharge  more 
adequately  her  task  as   a   woman   in  a 
76 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

republic,  her  respect  for  the  task  has 
been  weakened.  In  this  process,  which 
we  call  emancipation,  she  has  in  a  sense 
lost  sight  of  the  purposes  of  emancipa- 
tion. Interested  in  acquiring  new  tools, 
she  has  come  to  believe  the  tools  more 
important  than  the  thing  for  which  she 
was  to  use  them.  She  has  found  out 
that  with  education  and  freedom,  pur- 
suits of  all  sorts  are  open  to  her,  and  by- 
following  these  pursuits  she  can  preserve 
her  personal  liberty,  avoid  the  grave 
responsibility,  the  almost  inevitable 
sorrows  and  anxieties,  which  belong  to 
family  life.  She  can  choose  her  friends 
and  change  them.  She  can  travel,  and 
gratify  her  tastes,  satisfy  her  personal 
ambitions.  The  snare  has  been  too 
great;  the  beauty  and  joy  of  free  indi- 
vidual life  have  dulled  the  sober  sense 
of  national  obligation.  The  result  is 
that  she  is  frequently  failing  to  dis- 
77 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

charge  satisfactorily  some  of  the  most 
imperative  demands  the  nation  makes 
upon  her. 

Take  as  an  illustration  the  moral 
training  of  the  child.  The  most  essential 
obligation  in  a  Woman's  Business  is  es- 
tablishing her  household  on  a  sound  moral 
basis.  If  a  child  is  anchored  to  basic  prin- 
ciples, it  is  because  his  home  is  built  on 
them.  If  he  understands  integrity  as  a 
man,  it  is  usually  because  a  woman  has 
done  her  work  well.  If  she  has  not  done 
it  well,  it  is  probable  that  he  will  be  a 
disturbance  and  a  menace  when  he  is 
turned  over  to  society.  Sending  defective 
steel  to  a  gunmaker  is  no  more  certain  to 
result  in  imsafe  guhs  than  turning  out 
boys  who  are  shifty  and  tricky  is  to  result 
in  a  corrupt  and  unhappy  community. 

Appalled  by  the  seriousness  of  the  task, 
or  lured  from  it  by  the  joys  of  liberty 
and  education,  the  woman  has  too  gen- 
78 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

erally  shifted  it  to  other  shoulders  — 
shoulders  which  were  waiting  to  help  her 
work  out  the  problem,  but  which  could 
never  be  a  substitute.  She  has  turned 
over  the  child  to  the  teacher,  secular 
and  religious,  and  fancied  that  he  might 
be  made  a  man  of  integrity  by  an  elabo- 
rate system  of  teaching  in  a  mass.  Has 
this  shifting  of  responsibility  no  relation 
to  the  general  lowering  of  our  commercial 
and  political  morality  ? 

For  years  we  have  been  bombarded 
with  evidence  of  an  appalling  indifference 
to  the  moral  quality  of  our  commercial 
and  political  transactions.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  revelations  of 
corruption  in  our  American  cities,  the 
use  of  town  councils.  State  legislatures, 
and  even  of  the  Federal  Government  in 
the  interests  of  private  business,  have  dis- 
credited the  democratic  system  through- 
out the  world.  It  has  given  more  ma- 
70 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

terial  for  those  of  other  lands  who  despise 
democracy  to  sneer  at  us  than  anything 
that  has  yet  happened  in  this  land. 
And  this  has  come  about  under  the  regime 
of  the  emancipated  woman.  Is  she  in  no 
way  responsible  for  it  ?  If  she  had  kept 
the  early  ideals  of  the  woman's  part  in 
democracy  as  clearly  before  her  eyes  as 
she  has  kept  some  of  her  personal  wants 
and  needs,  could  there  have  been  so 
disastrous  a  condition  ?  Would  she  be 
the  Uneasy  Woman  she  is  if  she  had  kept 
faith  with  the  ideals  that  forced  her  eman- 
cipation ?  —  if  she  had  not  substituted 
for  them  dreams  of  personal  ambition, 
happiness,  and  freedom  ! 

The  failure  to  fulfill  your  function  in 
the  scheme  under  which  you  live  always 
produces  unrest.  Content  of  mind  is 
usually  in  proportion  to  the  service  one 
renders  in  an  undertaking  he  believes 
worth  while.  If  our  Uneasy  Woman 
80 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

could  grasp  the  full  meaning  of  her  place 
in  this  democracy,  a  place  so  essential 
that  democracy  must  be  overthrown  un- 
less she  rises  to  it  —  a  part  which  man  is 
not  equipped  to  play  and  which  he  ought 
not  to  be  asked  to  play,  would  she  not 
cease  to  apologize  for  herself  —  cease 
to  look  with  envy  on  man's  occupations  ? 
Would  she  not  rise  to  her  part  and  we  not 
have  at  last  the  "new  woman"  of  whom 
we  have  talked  so  long  ? 

Learning,  business  careers,  political  and 
industrial  activities  —  none  of  these 
things  is  more  than  incidental  in  the 
national  task  of  woman.  Her  great  task 
is  to  prepare  the  citizen.  The  citizen 
is  not  prepared  by  a  training  in  practical 
politics.  Something  more  fundamental 
is  required.  The  meaning  of  honor  and 
of  the  sanctity  of  one's  word,  the  under- 
standing of  the  principles  of  democracy 
and  of  the  society  in  which  we  live,  the 
a  81 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN    , 

love  of  humanity,  and  the  desire  to  serve, 
—  these  are  what  make  a  good  citizen. 
The  tools  for  preparing  herself  to  give  this 
training  are  in  the  woman's  hands.  It 
calls  for  education,  and  the  nation  has  pro- 
vided it.  It  calls  for  freedom  of  move- 
ment and  expression,  and  she  has  them. 
It  calls  for  ability  to  organize,  to  discuss 
problems,  to  work  for  whatever  changes 
are  essential.  She  is  developing  this 
ability.  It  may  be  that  it  calls  for  the 
vote.  I  do  not  myself  see  this,  but  it  is 
certain  that  she  will  have  the  vote  as 
soon  as  not  a  majority,  but  an  ap- 
proximate half,  not  of  men  —  but  of 
women  —  feel  the  need  of  it. 

What  she  has  partially  at  least  lost 
sight  of  is  that  education,  freedom,  organ- 
ization, agitation,  the  suffrage,  are  but 
tools  to  an  end.  What  she  now  needs 
is  to  formulate  that  end  so  nobly  and 
clearly  that  the  most  ignorant  woman 
82 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

may  understand  it.  The  failure  to  do 
this  is  leading  her  deeper  and  deeper 
into  fruitless  unrest.  It  is  also  dulling 
her  sense  of  the  necessity  of  keeping  her 
business  abreast  with  the  times.  At  one 
particular  and  vital  point  this  shows 
painfully,  and  that  is  her  slowness  in 
socializing  her  home. 


88 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   SOCIALIZATION   OF   THE   HOME 

It  is  only  by  much  junketing  about 
that  one  comes  to  the  full  realization  of 
what  men  and  women  in  the  main  are 
doing  in  this  country.  One  learns  as  he 
passes  from  town  to  town,  through  cities 
and  across  plains,  that  the  general  reason 
for  industry  everywhere  is  to  get  the 
means  to  build  and  support  a  home. 
Row  upon  row,  street  upon  street,  they 
run  in  every  village  you  traverse.  They 
dot  the  hills  and  valleys,  they  break  up 
the  mountain  side. 

Every  night  they  draw  to  their  shelter 

millions  of  men  who  have  toiled  since 

morning  to  earn  the  money  to  build  and 

keep  them  running.     All  day  they  shelter 

84 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

millions  of  women  who  toil  from  dawn 
to  dark  to  put  meaning  into  them.  To 
shelter  two  people  and  the  children 
that  come  to  them,  to  provide  them  a 
place  in  which  to  eat  and  sleep,  is  that 
the  only  function  of  these  homes  ?  If 
that  were  all,  few  homes  would  be  built. 
When  that  becomes  all,  the  home  is  no 
more  !  To  furnish  a  body  for  a  soul, 
that  is  the  physical  function  of  the  home. 
There  are  certain  people  who  cry  out 
that  for  a  woman  this  undertaking  has 
no  meaning  —  that  for  her  it  is  a  cook 
stove  and  a  dustpan,  a  childbed,  and  a 
man  who  regards  her  as  his  servant.  One 
might  with  equal  justice  say  that  for  the 
man  it  is  made  up  of  ten,  twelve,  or  more 
hours,  at  the  plow,  the  engine,  the  counter, 
or  the  pen  for  the  sake  of  supporting  a 
woman  and  children  whom  he  rarely 
sees  !  Unhappily,  there  are  such  com- 
binations; they  are  not  homes !  They 
85 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

are  deplorable  failures  of  people  who  have 
tried  to  make  homes.  To  insist  that 
they  are  anything  else  is  to  overlook  the 
facts  of  life,  to  doubt  the  sanity  of  man- 
kind which  hopefully  and  courageously 
goes  on  building,  building,  building,  sacri- 
ficing, binding  itself  forever  and  ever  to 
what  ?  —  a  shell  ?  No,  to  the  institution 
which  its  observation  and  experience  tell 
it,  is  the  one  out  of  which  men  and  women 
have  gotten  the  most  hope,  dignity,  and 
joy,  —  the  place  through  which,  whatever 
its  failures  and  illusions,  they  get  the 
fullest  development  and  the  opportunity 
to  render  the  most  useful  social  service. 

It  is  this  grounded  conviction  that  the 
home  takes  first  rank  among  social  in- 
stitutions which  gives  its  tremendous 
seriousness  to  the  Business  of  Being  a 
Woman.  She  is  the  one  who  must  sit 
always  at  its  center,  the  one  who  holds 
a  strategic  position  for  dealing  directly 
86 


THE   SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

with  its  problems.  Far  from  these  prob- 
lems being  purely  of  a  menial  nature,  as 
some  would  have  us  believe,  they  are 
of  the  most  delicate  social  and  spiritual 
import.  A  woman  in  reality  is  at  the 
head  of  a  social  laboratory  where  all  the 
problems  are  of  primary,  not  secondary, 
importance,  since  they  all  deal  directly 
with  human  life. 

One  of  the  most  illuminating  ex- 
periences of  travel  is  visiting  the  great 
chateaux  of  France.  One  goes  to  see 
"historical  monuments,"  the  scenes  of 
strange  and  tragic  human  experiences; 
he  finds  he  is  in  somebody's  private 
house,  which  by  order  of  the  government 
is  opened  to  the  public  one  day  of  the 
week  !  He  probably  will  not  realize  this 
fully  unless  he  suddenly  opens  a  door,  not 
intended  to  be  opened,  behind  which  he 
finds  a  mass  of  children's  toys  —  go-carts 
and  dolls,  balls  and  tennis  rackets  — 
87 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

or  stumbles  into  a  room  supposed  to  be 
locked  where  framed  photographs,  sofa 
cushions,  and  sewing  tables  abound  ! 

To  the  average  American  it  comes 
almost  as  a  shock  that  these  open  homes 
are  the  logic  of  democracy.  It  is  almost 
sure  to  set  him  thinking  that  after  all 
the  home,  anybody's  home,  even  one 
in  such  big  contrast  to  this  chateau  as  a 
two-story  frame  house,  on  Avenue  A, 
in  B-ville,  has  a  relation  to  the  public. 
He  has  touched  a  great  social  truth. 

To  socialize  her  home,  that  is  the  high 
undertaking  a  woman  has  on  her  hands  if 
she  is  to  get  at  the  heart  of  her  Business. 
And  what  do  we  mean  by  socialization .? 
Is  it  other  than  to  put  the  stamp  of 
affectionate,  intelligent  human  interest 
upon  all  the  operations  and  the  inter- 
course of  the  center  she  directs  ?  To 
make  a  place  in  which  the  various  mem- 
bers can  live  freely  and  draw  to  themselves 
88 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OP  THE  HOME 

those  with  whom  they  are  sympathetic  — 
a  place  in  which  there  is  spiritual  and 
intellectual  room  for  all  to  grow  and  be 
happy  each  in  his  own  way  ?  4 

I  doubt  if  there  is  any  problem  in  the 
Woman's  Business  which  requires  a  higher 
grade  of  intelligence,  and  certainly  none 
that  requires  broader  sympathies,  than 
this  of  giving  to  her  home  that  quality 
of  stimulation  and  joyousness  which 
makes  young  and  old  seek  it  gladly  and 
freely. 

To  do  this  requires  money,  freedom, 
time,  and  strength  ?  No,  what  I  mean 
does  not  depend  upon  these  things.  It 
is  the  notion  that  it  does  that  often  pre- 
vents its  growth.  For  it  is  a  spirit, 
an  attitude  of  mind,  and  not  a 
formula  or  a  piece  of  machinery.  As 
far  as  my  observation  goes  it  is  quite, 
if  not  more  likely,  to  be  found  in  a  three- 
room  apartment,  where  a  family  is  living 
89 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

on  fifteen  dollars  a  week,  as  in  an  East 
Central  Park  mansion  !  In  these  little 
families  where  love  prevails  —  it  usually 
does  exist.  It  is  the  kind  of  an 
atmosphere  in  which  a  man  prefers  to 
smoke  his  pipe  rather  than  go  to  the 
saloon;  where  the  girl  brings  her  young 
man  home  rather  than  walk  with  him. 
Mutual  interest  and  affection  is  its  note. 
Such  homes  do  exist  by  the  tens  of  thou- 
sands; even  in  New  York  City.  It  is 
not  from  them  that  girls  go  to  brothels 
or  boys  to  the  Tombs. 

Externally,  these  homes  are  often  pretty 
bad  to  look  at  —  overcrowded,  disorderly, 
and  noisy.  Cleanliness,  order,  and  space 
are  good  things,  but  it  is  a  mistake  to 
think  that  there  is  no  virtue  without  them. 
There  are  more  primary  and  essential 
things;  things  to  which  they  should  be 
added,  but  without  which  they  are  life- 
less virtues.  In  one  of  Miss  Loane's 
90 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

reports  on  the  life  of  the  EngHsh  poor, 
she  makes  these  truthful  observations :  — 

One  learns  to  understand  how  it  is  that  the 
dirty,  untidy  young  wife,  who,  when  her  husband 
returns  hungry  and  tired  from  a  long  day's  work, 
holds  up  a  smilingly  assured  face  to  be  kissed, 
exclaiming,  "  Gracious !  if  I  hadn't  forgot  all 
about  your  tea ! "  and  clatters  together  an  ex- 
travagant and  iU-chosen  meal  while  she  pours  out 
a  stream  of  cheerful  and  inconsequent  chatter, 
is  more  loved,  and  dealt  with  more  patiently, 
tenderly,  and  faithfully,  than  her  clean  and  frugal 
neighbor,  who  has  prepared  a  meal  that  ought 
to  turn  the  author  of  Twenty  Satisfying  Suppers 
for  Sixpence  green  with  envy,  but  who  expects 
her  husband  to  be  eternally  grateful  because  "he 
could  eat  his  dinner  oflf  the  boards,"  —  when  all 
that  the  poor  man  asks  is  to  be  allowed  to  walk 
over  them  unreproached. 

Peace  and  good  will  may  go  with 
disorder  and  carelessness  !  They  may  fly 
order  and  thrift.  They  will  fly  them 
when  order  and  thrift  are  held  as  the  more 
desirable.  A  woman  is  often  slow  to 
91 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

learn  that  good  housekeeping  alone  cannot 
produce  a  milieu  in  which  family  happi- 
ness thrives  and  to  which  people  naturally 
gravitate.  She  looks  at  it  as  the  fulfill- 
ment of  the  law  —  the  end  of  her  Business. 
It  is  the  exaggerated  place  she  gives  it 
in  the  scheme  of  things,  which  brings 
disaster  to  her  happiness  and  gives  sub- 
stance to  the  argument  that  woman's  lot 
in  life  is  fatal  to  her  development.  House- 
keeping is  only  the  shell  of  a  Woman's 
Business.  Women  lose  themselves  in  it 
as  men  lose  themselves  in  shopkeeping, 
farming,  editing.  Knowing  nothing  but 
your  work  is  one  of  the  commonest  human 
mistakes.  Pitifully  enough  it  is  often  a 
deliberate  mistake  —  the  only  way  or 
the  easiest  way  one  finds  to  quiet  an 
unsatisfied  heart.  The  undue  place  given 
good  housekeeping  in  many  a  woman's 
scheme  of  life  is  the  more  tragic  because  it 
is  a  distortion  of  one  of  the  finest  things 
92 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

in  the  human  experience  —  the  satisfac- 
tion of  doing  a  thing  well.  It  is  a  satis- 
faction which  the  worker  must  have 
if  he  is  to  get  joy  from  his  labor.  But 
labor  is  not  for  the  sake  of  itself.  It 
must  have  its  human  reason.  You  re- 
joice in  a  "deep-driven  plow"  —  but  if 
there  was  to  be  no  harvest,  your  straight, 
full  furrows  would  be  little  comfort.  You 
rejoice  to  build  a  stanch  and  beautiful 
house,  but  if  you  knew  it  was  to  stand 
forever  vacant,  joy  would  go  from  your 
task.  An  end  work  must  have.  One 
does  not  keep  house  for  its  own  sake. 
It  is  absorption  in  the  process  —  the 
refusal  to  allow  it  to  be  forgotten  or 
utilized  freely,  that  makes  the  work 
barren.  It  is  like  becoming  so  absorbed 
in  a  beautiful  frame  that  you  are  un- 
conscious of  the  picture  —  unconscious 
that  there  is  a  picture.  Things  must 
serve  their  purpose  if  they  are  to  con- 
93 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

vince  of  their  beauty.  Try  living  in  a 
room  with  a  wonderfully  fitted  fireplace; 
its  mantel  of  exquisite  design  and  work- 
manship, its  fire  irons  masterpieces  of 
art  —  and  no  heat  from  it !  Note  how 
utterly  distasteful  it  all  becomes.  It  is 
no  longer  beautiful  because  it  does  not 
do  the  work  it  was  made  beautiful  to  do. 
One  of  the  most  repellent  houses  in 
which  I  have  ever  visited  was  one  in 
which  there  was,  from  garret  to  cellar, 
so  far  as  I  discovered,  not  one  article 
which  was  not  of  the  period  imitated, 
not  one  streak  of  color  which  was  not 
"right."  It  was  a  masterpiece  of  correct 
furnishing,  but  it  gave  one  a  curious  sense 
of  limitation.  One  could  not  escape  the 
scheme.  The  inelasticity  of  it  hampered 
sociability  —  and  there  grew  on  one,  too, 
a  sense  of  unfitness.  His  clothes  were  an 
anachronism  !  They  were  the  only  thing 
which  did  not  belong  ! 
94 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

There  is  an  old-fashioned  adjective 
which  describes  better  than  any  other 
this  preoccupation  with  things,  which 
so  often  prevents  a  woman's  coming 
to  an  understanding  of  the  heart  of  her 
Business.  It  is  old  maidish.  It  has  often 
been  the  pathetic  fate  of  single  women 
to  live  alone.  To  minister  to  themselves 
becomes  their  occupation.  The  force  of 
their  natures  turns  to  their  belongings. 
If  in  straitened  circumstances  they  give 
their  souls  to  spotless  floors;  if  rich, 
to  flawless  mahogany  and  china,  to  per- 
fect household  machinery.  Wherever 
you  find  in  woman  this  perversion  — 
old  maidish  is  perhaps  the  most  ac- 
curate word  for  her  —  it  is  a  sacrifice 
of  the  human  to  the  material.  A  house 
without  sweet  human  litter,  without  the 
trace  of  many  varying  tastes  and  occupa- 
tions, without  the  trail  of  friends  who 
perhaps  have  no  sense  of  beauty  but 
95 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

who  love  to  give,  without  the  scars  of 
use,  and  the  dust  of  running  feet  —  what 
is  it  but  a  meatless  shell ! 

This  devotion  to  "things"  may  easily 
become  a  ghoulish  passion.  It  is  such 
that  Ibsen  hints  at  in  the  Master  Builder ^ 
when  he  makes  Aline  Solness  attribute 
her  perpetual  black,  her  somber  eyes 
and  smileless  lips,  not  to  the  death  of 
her  two  little  boys  which  has  come  about 
through  the  burning  of  her  home,  that 
was  a  "dispensation  of  Providence"  to 
which  she  "bows  in  submission,"  but 
to  the  destruction  of  the  things  which 
were  "mine"  —  "All  the  old  portraits 
were  burnt  upon  the  walls,  and  all  the 
old  silk  dresses  were  burnt  that  had 
belonged  to  the  family  for  generations  and 
generations.  And  all  mother's  and  grand- 
mother's lace  —  that  was  burnt,  too,  and 
only  think,  the  jewels  too." 

One  of  the  most  disastrous  effects  of 
96 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

this  preocccupation  with  the  things 
and  the  labors  of  the  household  is  the 
killing  of  conversation.  There  is  per- 
haps no  more  general  weakness  in  the 
average  American  family  than  glumness! 
The  silent  newspaper-reading  father,  the 
worried  watchful  mother,  the  surly  boy, 
the  fretful  girl,  these  are  characters  typ- 
ical in  both  town  and  country.  In  one 
of  Mrs.  Daskam  Bacon's  lively  tales, 
"Ardelia  in  Arcadia,"  the  little  heroine 
is  transplanted  from  a  lively,  chattering, 
sweltering  New  York  street  to  the  mad- 
dening silence  of  an  overworked  farmer's 
table.  She  stands  it  as  long  as  she 
can,  then  cries  out,  "For  Gawd's  sake, 
talkr' 

One  secret  of  the  attraction  for  the 
young  of  the  city  over  the  country  or 
small  town  is  contact  with  those  who 
talk.  They  are  conscious  of  the  exercise 
of  a  freedom  they  have  never  known  — 
H  97 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

the  freedom  to  say  what  rises  to  the  lips. 
They  experience  the  unknown  joy  of 
play  of  mind.  According  to  their  obser- 
vation the  tongue  and  mind  are  used 
only  when  needed  for  serious  service : 
to  keep  them  active,  to  allow  them  to 
perform  whatever  nimble  feats  their  own- 
ers fancy  —  this  is  a  revelation  ! 

Free  family  talk  is  sometimes  ruined 
by  a  mistaken  effort  to  direct  it  according 
to  some  artificial  notions  of  what  con- 
versation means.  Conversation  means 
free  giving  of  what  is  uppermost  in 
the  mind.  The  more  spontaneous  it 
is  the  more  interesting  and  genuine 
it  is.  It  is  this  freedom  which  gives 
to  the  talk  of  the  child  its  surprises 
and  often  its  startling  power  to  set  one 
thinking.  Holding  talk  to  some  severe 
standard  of  consistency,  dignity,  or 
subject  is  sure  to  stiffen  and  hamper 
it.     There    could    have     been    nothing 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

very  free  or  joyful  about  talking 
according  to  a  program  as  the  ladies  of 
the  eighteenth-century  salons  were  more 
or  less  inclined.  Good  conversation  runs 
like  water;  nothing  is  foreign  to  it. 
"Farming  is  such  an  unintellectual  sub- 
ject," I  heard  a  critical  young  woman  say 
to  her  husband,  whose  tastes  were  bucolic. 
The  young  woman  did  not  realize  that  one 
of  the  masterpieces  of  the  greatest  of  the 
world's  writers  was  on  farming  —  most 
practical  farming,  too  !  That  which  re- 
lates to  the  life  of  each,  interests  each, 
concerns  each  —  that  is  the  material  for 
conversation,  if  it  is  to  be  enjoyable  or 
productive. 

One  of  a  woman's  real  difficulties  in 
creating  a  free-speaking  household  is 
her  natural  tendency  to  regard  opinions 
as  personal.  To  differ  is  something  she 
finds  it  difficult  to  tolerate.  To  her 
mind  it  is  to  be  unfriendly.  This  pro- 
99 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

pensity  to  give  a  personal  turn  to  things 
is  an  expression  of  that  intensity  of 
nature  which  makes  her,  as  Mr.  KipHng 
has  truthfully  put  it,  "more  deadly 
than  the  male!'*  She  must  be  that  — 
were  she  not,  the  race  would  dwindle.  He 
would  never  sacrifice  himself  as  she  does 
for  the  preservation  of  the  young  !  This 
necessity  of  concentrating  her  whole  being 
on  a  little  group  makes  her  personal. 
The  wise  woman  is  she  who  recognizes 
that  like  all  great  forces  this,  too,  has 
its  weakness.  Because  a  woman  must 
be  "more  deadly  than  the  male"  in 
watching  her  offspring  is  no  reason  she 
should  be  so  in  guarding  an  opinion. 
Certainly  if  she  is  so,  conversation  is  cut 
off  at  the  root. 

Not  infrequently  she  is  loath  to  en- 
courage free  expression  because  it  seems 
to  her  to  disturb  the  peace.     Certainly 
it  does  disturb  fixity  of  views.     It  does 
100 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

prevent  things  becoming  settled  in  the 
way  that  the  woman,  as  a  rule,  loves  to 
have  them,  but  this  disturbance  prevents 
the  rigid  intellectual  and  spiritual  atmos- 
phere which  often  drives  the  young  from 
home.  Peace  which  comes  from  sub- 
mission and  restraint  is  a  poor  thing. 
In  the  long  run  it  turns  to  revolt.  The 
woman,  if  she  examines  her  own  soul, 
knows  the  effect  upon  it  of  habitual 
submission  to  a  husband's  opinion.  She 
knows  it  is  a  habit  fatal  to  her  own 
development.  While  at  the  beginning 
she  may  have  been  willing  enough  to 
sacrifice  her  ideas,  later  she  makes  the 
painful  discovery  that  this  hostage  to 
love,  as  she  considered  it,  has  only  made 
her  less  interesting,  less  important,  both 
to  herself  and  to  him.  It  has  made  it 
the  more  difficult,  also,  to  work  out  that 
socialization  of  her  home  which,  as  her 
children  grow  older,  she  realizes,  if  she 
101 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

thinks,    is   one   of   her   most   imperative 
duties. 

A  woman  is  very  prone  to  look  on 
marriage  as  a  merger  of  personaHties, 
but  there  can  be  no  great  union  where  an 
individuality  permits  itself  to  be  ruined. 
The  notion  that  a  woman's  happiness 
depends  on  the  man  —  that  he  must 
"make  her  happy"  —  is  a  basic  untruth. 
Life  is  an  individual  problem,  and  con- 
sequently happiness  must  be.  Others 
may  hamper  it,  but  in  the  final  summing 
up  it  is  you,  not  another,  who  gives  or 
takes  it  —  no  two  people  can  work  out  a 
high  relation  if  the  precious  inner  self 
of  either  is  sacrificed. 

Emerson  has  said  the  great  word :  — 

Leave  all  for  love  ; 

Yet,  hear  me,  yet. 

Keep  thee  to-day. 

To-morrow,  forever. 

Free  as  an  Arab  I 

Of  thy  beloved. 
102 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

The  "open  house,"  that  is, the  sociaHzed 
house,  depends  upon  this  free  mind  to  a 
degree  only  second  to  that  spirit  of  "  good 
will  to  man,"  upon  which  it  certainly 
must,  like  all  institutions  in  a  demo- 
cratic Christian  nation,  be  based.  This 
good  will  is  only  another  name  for  neigh- 
borliness  —  the  spirit  of  friendly  recog- 
nition of  all  those  who  come  within  one's 
radius.  Neighborliness  is  based  upon 
the  Christian  and  democratic  proposition 
that  all  men  are  brothers  —  a  proposition 
with  which  the  sects  and  parties  of 
Christianity  and  democracy  often  play 
havoc.  In  their  zeal  for  an  interpretation 
or  system  they  sacrifice  the  very  things 
they  were  devised  to  perpetuate  and 
extend  among  men.  A  sectarian  or  par- 
tisan household  cannot  be  a  genuinely 
neighborly  household.  It  has  cut  off 
too  large  a  part  of  its  source  of  supply. 

The  most  perfect  type  of  this  spirit  of 
103 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

neighborliness  which  we  have  worked 
out  in  this  country,  outside  of  the  thou- 
sands of  little  homes  where  it  exists 
and  of  which,  in  the  nature  of  the  case, 
only  those  who  have  felt  their  influence 
can  know,  is  undoubtedly  Hull  House, 
the  Chicago  Settlement  under  the  direc- 
tion of  Jane  Addams.  Hull  House  is 
an  "open  house"  for  its  neighborhood. 
It  is  a  place  where  men  and  women 
of  all  ages,  conditions,  and  points  of 
view  are  welcome.  So  far  as  I  have  been 
able  to  discover,  genuine  freedom  of  mind 
and  friendliness  of  spirit  are  what  have 
made  Hull  House  possible  and  are  what 
will  decide  its  future  after  the  day  of  the 
great  woman  who  has  mothered  it  and 
about  whom  it  revolves.  There  is  no 
formula  for  building  a  Hull  House  —  any 
more  than  there  is  a  home.  Both  are 
the  florescence  of  a  spirit  and  a  mind. 
Each  will  form  itself  according  to  the 
104 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

ideas,  the  tastes,  and  the  cultivation  of 
the  individuality  at  its  center.  Its  activi- 
ties will  follow  the  peculiar  needs  which 
she  has  the  brains  and  heart  to  discover, 
the  ingenuity  and  energy  to  meet. 

Hull  House  serves  its  neighborhood, 
and  in  so  doing  it  serves  most  fully  its 
own  household.  Its  own  members  are  the 
ones  whose  minds  get  the  most  illumi- 
nation from  its  activities.  Moreover, 
Hull  House  from  its  first-hand  sym- 
pathetic dealing  with  men  and  women  in 
its  neighborhood  learns  the  needs  of  the 
neighborhood.  It  is  and  for  years  has 
been  a  constant  source  of  suggestion 
and  of  agitation  for  the  betterment  of 
the  conditions  under  which  its  neighbors 
—  and  indirectly  the  whole  city,  even 
nation  —  live  and  work.  Health,  mind, 
morals,  all  are  in  its  care.  It  is  practical 
in  the  plans  it  offers.  It  can  back  up 
its  demands  with  knowledge  founded  on 
105 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

actual  contact.  It  can  rally  all  of  the 
enlightened  and  decent  forces  of  the 
city  to  its  help.  Hull  House,  indeed,  is 
a  very  source  of  pure  life  in  the  great  city 
where  it  belongs. 

So  far  as  attitude  of  mind  and  spirit 
go,  the  home  should  be  to  the  little 
neighborhood  in  which  it  works  what 
Hull  House  is  to  its  great  field.  In  its 
essential  structure  it  is  the  same  thing; 
i.e.  Hull  House  is  really  modeled  after 
the  home.  Most  interesting  is  the  parallel 
between  its  organization  and  its  activities 
and  those  of  many  a  great  home  which  we 
know  through  the  lives  of  their  mistresses, 
that  of  Margaret  Winthrop,  of  Eliza 
Pinckney,  of  Mrs.  John  Adams. 

The  social  significance  of  Hull  House  is 
in  its  relative  degree  the  possible  social 
significance  of  every  home  in  this  land. 
The  realization  depends  entirely  upon 
the  conception  the  woman  in  a  particular 
106 


THE  SOCIALIZATION  OF  THE  HOME 

house  has  of  this  side  of  her  Business  — 
whether  or  no  she  sees  neighborHness 
in  this  big  sense.  That  she  does  not 
see  it  is  too  often  due  to  the  fact  that 
even  though  she  may  have  "  gone  through 
college,"  she  has  no  notion  of  society  as  a 
living  structure  made  up  of  various  inter- 
dependent institutions,  the  first  and  fore- 
most of  which  is  a  family  or  home. 

Absurd  as  it  is.  Society,  which  is 
founded  on  the  family,  is  to-day  giving 
only  perfunctory  and  half-hearted  atten- 
tion to  the  family.  The  whole  vocabulary 
of  the  institution  has  taken  on  such  a 
quality  of  cant,  that  one  almost  hesitates 
to  use  the  words  "home"  and  "mother"  ! 
A  girl's  education  should  contain  at  least 
as  much  serious  instruction  on  the  re- 
lation of  the  family  to  Society  as  it  does 
on  the  relation  of  the  Carboniferous  Age 
to  the  making  of  the  globe.  At  present, 
it  usually  has  less.  It  is  but  another 
107 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

evidence  of  the  pressing  need  there  is  of 
giving  to  the  Woman's  Business  a  more 
scientific  treatment  —  of  revitahzing  its 
vocabulary,  reformulating  its  problems, 
of  giving  it  the  dignity  it  deserves,  that 
of  a  great  profession.  It  is  the  failure  to 
do  this  which  is  at  the  bottom  of  woman's 
present  disorderly  and  antisocial  handling 
of  three  of  the  leading  occupations  of  her 
life  —  her  clothes,  her  domestics,  and  her 
daughter. 


108 


CHAPTER  V 

A   WOMAN  AND   HER   RAIMENT 

One  of  the  most  domineering  im- 
pulses in  men  and  women  is  that  bidding 
them  to  make  themselves  beautiful.  In 
the  normal  girl-child  it  comes  out,  as 
does  her  craving  for  a  doll.  Nature  is 
telling  her  what  her  work  in  the  world  is 
to  be.  It  stays  with  her  to  the  end,  its 
flame  often  flickering  long  after  her  arms 
have  ceased  their  desire  to  cradle  a  child. 
Scorn  it,  ridicule  it,  deny  it,  it  is  nature's 
will,  and  as  such  must  be  obeyed,  and  in 
the  obeying  should  be  honored. 

But  this  instinct,  which  has  led  men 

and    women    from    strings    of    shells    to 

modern  clothes,  like  every  other  human 

instinct,    has    its    distortions.     It    is    in 

109 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

the  failure  to  see  the  relative  importance 
of  things,  to  keep  the  proportions,  that 
human  beings  lose  control  of  their  en- 
dowment. Give  an  instinct  an  inch,  and 
it  invariably  takes  its  ell !  The  instinct 
for  clothes,  from  which  we  have  learned 
so  much  in  our  climb  from  savagery, 
has  more  than  once  had  the  upper  hand 
of  us.  So  dangerous  to  the  prosperity 
and  the  seriousness  of  peoples  has  its 
tyranny  been,  that  laws  have  again  and 
again  been  passed  to  check  it;  punish- 
ments have  been  devised  to  frighten  off 
men  from  indulging  it;  whole  classes 
have  been  put  into  dull  and  formless 
costumes  to  crucify  it. 

Man  gradually  and  in  the  main  has 
conquered  his  passion  for  ornament.  To- 
day, in  the  leading  nations  of  the  world, 
he  clothes  rather  than  arrays  himself. 
Woman  has  not  harnessed  the  instinct. 
She  still  allows  it  to  drive  her,  and  often 
110 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

to  her  own  grave  prejudice.  Even  in  a 
democracy  like  our  own,  woman  has 
not  been  able  to  master  this  problem  of 
clothes.  In  fact,  democracy  has  com- 
plicated the  problem  seriously. 

Under  the  old  regime  costumes  had 
been  worked  out  for  the  various  classes. 
They  were  adapted  both  to  the  purse  and 
to  the  pursuit.  They  were  fitting  —  that 
is,  silk  was  not  worn  in  huts  or  homespun 
in  palaces ;  slippers  were  for  carriages  and 
sabots  for  streets.  The  garments  of  a 
class  were  founded  on  good  sound  prin- 
ciples on  the  whole  —  but  they  marked 
the  class.  Democracy  sought  to  destroy 
outward  distinctions.  The  proscribed 
costumes  went  into  the  pot  with  pro- 
scribed positions.  Under  democracy  we 
can  cook  in  silk  petticoats  and  go  to  the 
White  House  in  a  cap  and  apron,  if  we 
will.  And  we  often  will,  that  being  a 
way  to  advertise  our  equality  ! 
Ill 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Class  costumes  destroyed,  the  princi- 
ples back  of  them,  that  is,  fitness,  quality, 
responsibility,  were  forgotten.  The  old 
instinct  for  ornament  broke  loose.  Its 
tyranny  was  strengthened  by  the  eternal 
desire  of  the  individual  to  prove  himself 
superior  to  his  fellows.  Wealth  is  the 
generally  accepted  standard  of  measure- 
ment of  value  in  this  country  to-day,  and 
there  is  no  way  in  which  the  average  man 
can  show  wealth  so  clearly  as  in  encour- 
aging his  women  folk  to  array  themselves. 
Thus  we  have  the  anomaly  in  a  democ- 
racy of  a  primitive  instinct  let  loose,  and 
the  adoption  of  discarded  aristocratic  de- 
vices for  proving  you  are  better  than 
your  neighbor,  at  least  in  the  one  revered 
particular  of  having  more  money  to  spend ! 

The  complication  of  the  woman's  life 

by  this  domination  of  clothes  is  extremely 

serious.     In  many  cases  it  becomes  not 

one  of  the  sides  of  her  business,  but  the 

112 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

business  of  her  life.  Such  undue  propor- 
tion has  the  matter  taken  in  the  Ameri- 
can Woman's  life  under  democracy  that 
one  is  sometimes  inclined  to  wonder  if 
it  is  not  the  real  "woman  question." 
Certainly  in  numbers  of  cases  it  is  the 
rock  upon  which  a  family's  happiness 
splits.  The  point  is  not  at  all  that  women 
should  not  occupy  themselves  seriously 
with  dress,  that  they  should  not  look 
on  it  as  an  art,  as  legitimate  as  any 
other.  The  difficulty  comes  in  not  mas- 
tering the  art,  in  the  entirely  dispro- 
portionate amount  of  attention  which  is 
given  to  the  subject,  in  the  disregard  of 
sound  principles. 

The  economic  side  of  the  matter  presses 
hard  on  the  whole  country.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  the  chief  economic 
concern  of  a  great  body  of  women  is 
how  to  get  money  to  dress,  not  as  they 
should,  but  as  they  want  to.  It  is  to 
1  113 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

get  money  for  clothes  that  drives  many, 
though  of  course  not  the  majority,  of 
girls,  into  shops,  factories,  and  offices.  It 
is  because  they  are  using  all  they  earn 
on  themselves  that  they  are  able  to  make 
the  brave  showing  that  they  do.  Many 
a  girl  is  misjudged  by  the  well-meaning 
observer  or  investigator  because  of  this 
fact  —  "  She  could  never  dress  like  that 
on  $6,  $8,  or  $15  a  week  and  support 
herself,"  they  tell  you.  She  does  not 
support  herself.  She  works  for  clothes, 
and  clothes  alone.  Moreover,  the  girl 
who  has  the  pluck  to  do  hard  regular  work 
that  she  may  dress  better  has  interest 
enough  to  work  at  night  to  make  her 
earnings  go  farther.  No  one  who  has 
been  thrown  much  with  office  girls  but 
knows  case  after  case  of  girls  who  with 
the  aid  of  some  older  member  of  the 
family  cut  and  make  their  gowns,  plan 
and  trim  their  hats.  Moreover,  this 
114 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RA.IMENT 

relieving  the  family  budget  of  dressing 
the  girl  is  a  boon  to  fathers  and  mothers. 

It  is  hard  on  industry,  however,  for  the 
wage  earner  who  can  afford  to  take  $6 
or  $8  helps  pull  down  the  wages  of  other 
thousands  who  support  not  only  them- 
selves, but  others. 

Moreover,  to  put  in  one's  days  in  hard 
labor  simply  to  dress  well,  for  that  is  the 
amount  of  it,  is  demoralizing.  It  is  this 
emphasis  on  the  matter  which  impels  a 
reckless  girl  sometimes  to  sell  herself 
for  money  to  buy  clothes.  "I  wanted 
the  money,"  I  heard  a  girl,  arrested  for 
her  first  street  soliciting,  tell  the  judge. 
"Had  you  no  home?"  "Yes."  "A 
good  home.?"  "Yes."  "For  what  did 
you  want  money  ?"     "Clothes." 

"Gee,  but  I  felt  as  if  I  would  give 

anything  for  one  of  them  willow  plumes," 

a   pretty    sixteen-year-old   girl   told   the 

police  matron  who  had  rescued  her  from 

115 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

a  man  with  whom  she  had  left  home,  be- 
cause he  promised  her  silk  gowns  and  hats 
with  feathers. 

This  ugly  preoccupation  with  dress  does 
not  begin  with  the  bottom  of  society. 
It  exists  there  because  it  exists  at  the 
top  and  filters  down.  In  each  successive 
layer  there  are  women  to  whom  dress  is  as 
much  of  a  vice  as  it  was  for  the  poor  little 
girls  I  quote  above.  It  is  a  vice  curiously 
parallel  to  that  of  gambling  among  men. 
Women  of  great  wealth  not  infrequently 
spend  princely  allowances  and  then  run 
accounts  which  come  into  the  courts  by 
their  inability  or  unwillingness  to  pay 
them.  It  is  curious  comment  on  women 
in  a  democracy  that  it  should  be  possible 
to  mention  them  in  the  same  breath  with 
Josephine,  Empress  of  the  French.  Na- 
poleon at  the  beginning  of  the  Empire 
allowed  Josephine  $72,000  a  year  for  her 
toilet;  later  he  made  it  $90,000.  But 
116 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

there  was  never  a  year  she  did  not  far 
outstrip  the  allowance.  Masson  declares 
that  on  an  average  she  spent  $220,000  a 
year,  and  the  itemized  accounts  of  the 
articles  in  her  wardrobe  give  authority 
for  the  amount. 

Josephine's  case  is  of  course  excep- 
tional in  history.  She  was  an  untrained 
woman,  generous  and  pleasure-loving, 
utterly  without  a  sense  of  responsibility. 
She  had  all  the  instincts  and  habits  of  a 
demi-mondaine;  moreover,  she  had  been 
thrust  into  a  position  where  she  was  ex- 
pected to  live  up  to  traditions  of  great 
magnificence.  Her  passion  for  ornament 
had  every  temptation  and  excuse,  for  it 
was  constantly  excited  by  the  hoards  of 
greedy  tradesmen  and  of  no  less  greedy 
ladies-in-waiting  who  himg  about  her  urg- 
ing her  to  buy  and  give.  It  is  hard  to 
believe  that  Josephine's  case  could  be 
even  remotely  suggested  in  our  democ- 
117 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

racy;  yet  one  woman  in  American 
society  bought  last  summer  in  Europe  a 
half-dozen  nightgowns  for  which  she 
paid  a  thousand  dollars  apiece.  There 
are  women  who  will  start  on  a  journey 
with  a  hundred  or  a  hundred  and  fifty 
pairs  of  shoes.  There  are  others  who 
bring  back  from  Europe  forty  or  fifty 
new  gowns  for  a  season!  What  can  one 
think  of  a  bill  of  $500  for  stockings  in  one 
season,  of  $20,000  for  a  season's  gowns, 
coats  and  hats  from  one  shop  and  as 
much  more  in  the  aggregate  for  the  same 
articles  in  the  same  period  from  other 
shops ;  this  showing  was  made  in  a  recent 
divorce  case. 

What  can  one  think  of  duties  of  over 
$30,000  paid  on  personal  articles  by 
one  woman  who  yearly  brings  back 
similar  quantities  of  jewelry  and  clothes. 
This  $30,000  in  duties  meant  an  expend- 
iture of  probably  about  $100,000.  It 
118 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

included  over  $1200  for  hats,  over  $3000 
for  corsets  and  lingerie.  This  was  un- 
doubtedly exceptional;  that  is,  few 
women  of  even  great  wealth  buy  so 
lavishly.  Yet  good  round  sums,  even  if 
they  are  small  in  comparison,  are  spent 
by  many  women  in  their  European  out- 
ings. They  will  bring  from  six  to  twelve 
gowns  which  will  average  at  least  $150 
apiece,  and  an  occasional  woman  will 
have  a  half-dozen  averaging  from  $450 
to  $500  apiece.  One  might  say  that 
eight  to  twelve  hats,  costing  $25  to  $50 
apiece,  was  a  fair  average,  though  $800 
to  $1200  worth  is  not  so  rare  as  to  cause 
a  panic  at  the  customhouse. 

The  comparative  amounts  which  men 
and  women  spend  affords  an  interesting 
comment  on  the  relative  importance 
which  men  and  women  attach  to  clothes. 
In  one  case  of  which  I  happen  to  know 
Mr.  A.  brought  in  $840  worth  of  wearing 
119 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

apparel :  Mrs.  A.  nearly  $10,000  worth, 
of  which  $7000  was  for  gowns.  A  man 
may  have  eight  to  ten  suits  of  pajamas 
which  cost  him  $10  apiece,  a  dozen 
or  two  waistcoats,  a  dozen  or  two  shirts, 
a  few  dozen  handkerchiefs  and  gloves,  a 
dozen  or  so  ties,  eight  or  ten  suits  of 
clothes,  but  from  $500  to  $1000  will  cover 
his  wardrobe;  his  wife  will  often  spend 
as  much  for  hats  alone  as  he  does  for 
an  entire  outfit ! 

The  difficulty  in  these  great  expendi- 
tures is  that  they  set  a  pace.  To  many 
women  of  wealth  they  are  no  doubt 
revolting.  They  recognize  that  there  are 
only  two  classes  of  women  who  can  justify 
them  —  the  actress  and  the  demi-mon- 
daine.  Yet  insensibly  many  of  these 
women  yield  to  the  pressure  of  tempta- 
tion. The  influence  is  subtle,  often  uncon- 
scious, and  for  this  reason  spreads  the 
more  widely.  Women  all  over  the  coun- 
120 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

try  find  that  the  pressure  is  to  spend 
more  for  clothes  each  year.  The  standard 
changes.  Occasions  multiply.  Fantasies 
entice.  Before  they  know  it  their  clothes 
are  costing  them  a  disproportionate  sum 
—  more  than  they  can  afford  if  their 
budget  is  to  balance. 

This  does  not  apply  to  one  class,  it 
creeps  steadily  down  to  the  very  poor. 
Investigators  of  small  household  budgets 
lay  it  down  as  a  rule  that  as  the  income 
increases  the  percentage  spent  for  clothing 
increases  more  rapidly  than  for  any  other 
item.  It  is  true  in  the  professional 
classes,  and  especially  burdensome  there ; 
for  the  income  is  usually  small,  but  the 
social  demand  great. 

There  are  certain  industrial  and  ethi- 
cal results  from  this  preoccupation  with 
clothes  which  should  not  be  overlooked, 
particularly  the  indifference  to  quality 
which  it  has  engendered.  The  very  heart 
121 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

of  the  question  of  clothes  of  the  American 
woman  is  imitation.  That  is,  we  are  not 
engaged  in  an  effort  to  work  out  indi- 
viduality. We  are  not  engaged  in  an 
effort  to  find  costumes  which  by  their 
expression  of  the  taste  and  the  spirit  of 
this  people  can  be  fixed  upon  as  appro- 
priate American  costumes,  something  of 
our  own.  From  top  to  bottom  we  are 
copying.  The  woman  of  wealth  goes 
to  Paris  and  Vienna  for  the  real  master- 
pieces in  a  season's  wardrobe.  The  great 
dressmakers  and  milliners  go  to  the  same 
cities  for  their  models.  Those  who  cannot 
go  abroad  to  seek  inspiration  and  ideas 
copy  those  who  have  gone  or  the  fashion 
plates  they  import.  The  French  or  Vien- 
nese mode,  started  on  upper  Fifth  Avenue, 
spreads  to  23d  St.,  from  23d  St.  to 
14th  St.,  from  14th  St.  to  Grand  and 
Canal.  Each  move  sees  it  reproduced 
in  materials  a  little  less  elegant  and 
122 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

durable,  its  colors  a  trifle  vulgarized, 
its  ornaments  cheapened,  its  laces  poorer. 
By  the  time  it  reaches  Grand  Street  the 
$400  gown  in  brocaded  velvet  from  the 
best  looms  in  Europe  has  become  a  cot- 
ton velvet  from  Lawrence  or  Fall  River, 
decorated  with  mercerized  lace  and  glass 
ornaments  from  Rhode  Island !  A 
travesty  —  and  yet  a  recognizable  trav- 
esty. The  East  Side  hovers  over  it  as 
Fifth  Avenue  has  done  over  the  original. 
The  very  shop  window,  where  it  is  dis- 
played, is  dressed  and  painted  and 
lighted  in  imitation  of  the  uptown  shop. 
The  same  process  goes  on  inland.  This 
same  gown  will  travel  its  downward  path 
from  New  York  westward,  until  the 
Grand  St.  creation  arrives  in  some  cheap 
and  gay  mining  or  factory  town.  From 
start  to  finish  it  is  imitation,  and  on  this 
imitation  vast  industries  are  built  —  imi- 
tations of  silk,  of  velvet,  of  lace,  of  jewels. 
123 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

These  imitations,  cheap  as  they  are, 
are  a  far  greater  extravagance,  for  their 
buyers,  than  the  original  model  was  for 
its  buyer,  for  the  latter  came  from  that 
class  where  money  does  not  count  — 
while  the  former  is  of  a  class  where  every 
penny  counts.  The  pity  of  it  is  that  the 
young  girls,  who  put  all  that  they  earn 
into  elaborate  lingerie  at  seventy-nine 
cents  a  set  (the  original  model  probably 
sold  at  $50  or  $100),  into  open-work 
hose  at  twenty-five  cents  a  pair  (the 
original  $10  a  pair),  into  willow  plumes 
at  $1.19  (the  original  sold  at  $50), 
never  have  a  durable  or  suitable  garment. 
They  are  bravely  ornamented,  but  never 
properly  clothed.  Moreover,  they  are 
brave  but  for  a  day.  Their  purchases 
have  no  goodness  in  them;  they  tear, 
grow  rusty,  fall  to  pieces  with  the  first  few 
wearings,  and  the  poor  little  victims  are 
shabby  and  bedraggled  often  before  they 
124 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

have  paid  for  their  belongings,  for  many 
of  these  things  are  bought  on  the  in- 
stallment plan,  particularly  hats  and 
gowns.  Under  these  circumstances,  it 
is  little  wonder  that  one  hears,  often  and 
often  among  their  class,  the  bitter  cry, 
"Gee,  but  it's  hell  to  be  poor!"  —  that 
one  finds  so  often  assigned  by  a  girl  as  the 
cause  of  her  downfall,  the  natural  reason 
—  "Wanted  to  dress  like  other  girls"  — 
"Wanted  pretty  clothes." 

This  habit  of  buying  poor  imitations 
does  not  end  in  the  girl's  life  with  her 
clothes.  When  she  marries,  she  carries  it 
into  her  home.  Decoration,  not  furnish- 
ing, is  the  keynote  of  all  she  touches. 
It  is  she  who  is  the  best  patron  of  the 
elaborate  and  monstrous  cheap  furniture, 
rugs,  draperies,  crockery,  bric-a-brac, 
which  fill  the  shops  of  the  cheaper  quarters 
of  the  great  cities,  and  usually  all  quarters 
of  the  newer  inland  towns. 
126 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Has  all  this  no  relation  to  national 
prosperity  —  to  the  cost  of  living  ?  The 
effect  on  the  victim's  personal  budget  is 
clear  —  the  effect  it  has  on  the  family 
budget,  which  it  dominates,  is  clear.  In 
both  cases  nothing  of  permanent  value 
is  acquired.  The  good  linen  under- 
garments, the  "all  wool"  gown,  the  broad- 
cloth cape  or  coat,  those  standard  gar- 
ments which  the  thrifty  once  acquired 
and  cherished,  only  awaken  the  mirth  of 
the  pretty  little  spendthrift  on  $8  a 
week.  Solid  pieces  of  furniture  such  as 
often  dignify  even  the  huts  of  European 
peasants  and  are  passed  down  from 
mother  to  daughter  for  generations  —  are 
objects  of  contempt  by  the  younger 
generation  here.  Even  the  daughters  of 
good  old  New  England  farmers  are  found 
to-day  glad  to  exchange  mahogany  for 
quartered  oak  and  English  pewter  for 
pressed  glass  and  stamped  crockery. 
126 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

True,  another  generation  may  come  in 
and  buy  it  all  back  at  fabulous  prices,  but 
the  waste  of  it ! 

This  production  of  shoddy  cloth,  cotton 
laces,  cheap  furniture,  what  is  it  but 
waste !  Waste  of  labor  and  material ! 
Time  and  money  and  strength  which 
might  have  been  turned  to  produc- 
ing things  of  permanent  values,  have 
been  spent  in  things  which  have 
no  goodness  in  them,  things  which 
because  of  their  lack  of  integrity  and 
soundness  must  be  forever  duplicated, 
instead  of  freeing  industry  to  go  ahead, 
producing  other  good  and  permanent 
things. 

What  it  all  amounts  to  is  that  the  in- 
stinct for  ornament  has  gotten  the  upper 
hand  of  a  great  body  of  American  women. 
We  have  failed  so  far  to  develop  standards 
of  taste,  fitness,  and  quality,  strong,  sure, 
and  good  enough  effectually  to  impose 
127 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

themselves.  There  is  no  national  taste 
in  dress ;  there  is  only  admirable  skill  in 
adapting  fashions  made  in  other  countries. 
There  is  no  national  sense  of  restraint 
and  proportion.  It  is  pretty  generally 
agreed  that  getting  all  you  can  is  entirely 
justifiable.  There  is  no  national  sense 
of  quality;  even  the  rich  to-day  in  this 
country  wear  imitation  laces.  The  effect 
of  all  this  is  a  bewildering  restlessness 
in  costume  —  a  sheeplike  willingness  to 
follow  to  the  extreme  the  grotesque  and 
the  fantastic.  The  very  general  adoption 
of  the  ugly  and  meaningless  fashions  of 
the  last  few  years  —  peach-basket  hats, 
hobble  skirts,  slippers  for  the  street  — 
is  a  case  in  point.  From  every  side  this  is 
bad  —  defeating  its  own  purpose  —  cor- 
rupting national  taste  and  wasting  na- 
tional substance. 

Moreover,  the  false  standard  it  sets  up 
socially    is    intolerable.     It   sounds   fan- 
128 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

tastic  to  say  that  whole  bodies  of  women 
place  their  chief  reliance  for  social  ad- 
vancement on  dress,  but  it  is  true.  They 
are,  or  are  not,  as  they  are  gowned  !  The 
worst  of  this  fantasy  is  not  only  that  it 
forces  too  much  attention  from  useful 
women,  but  that  it  gives  such  poise  and 
assurance  to  the  ignorant  and  useless  ! 
If  you  look  like  the  women  of  a  set,  you 
are  as  "good"  as  they,  is  the  democratic 
standard  of  many  a  young  woman.  If 
for  any  reason  she  is  not  able  to  produce 
this  effect,  she  shrinks  from  contact, 
whatever  her  talent  or  charm  !  And  she 
is  often  not  altogether  wrong  in  thinking 
she  will  not  be  welcome  if  her  dress  is  not 
that  of  the  circle  to  which  she  aspires. 
Many  a  woman  indifferently  gowned  has 
been  made  to  feel  her  difference  from  the 
elegant  she  found  herself  among.  If  she 
is  sure  of  herself  and  has  a  sense  of 
humor,  this  may  be  an  amusing  ex- 
K  129 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

perience.     To  many,  however,  it  is  an 
embittering  one  ! 

Now  these  observations  are  not  pre- 
sented as  discoveries  !  They  were  true, 
at  least,  as  far  back  as  the  Greeks.  In 
fact,  there  is  nothing  in  the  so-called 
woman's  movement,  which  in  its  essence 
did  not  exist  then.  The  stream  of  human 
aspirations,  with  its  stretches  of  wisdom 
and  of  folly,  has  flowed  steadily  through 
the  ages,  and  on  its  troubled  surface  men 
and  women  have  always  struggled  to- 
gether as  they  are  struggling  to-day. 
These  little  comments  simply  seem  to  the 
writer  worth  making  because  for  the 
moment  the  truths  behind  them  are 
not  getting  as  much  attention  as  they 
deserve.  Certainly  the  tyranny  dress 
exercises  over  the  woman  in  this  American 
democracy  is  an  old  enough  theme.  In- 
deed, it  has  always  formed  a  part  of  her 
program  of  emancipation.  Out  of  her 
130 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

revolt  against  its  absurdities  has  come 
the  most  definite  development  in  Ameri- 
can costume  which  we  have  had,  and 
that  is  the  sensible  street  costume,  which 
in  spite  of  efforts  to  distort  and  displace 
it,  a  woman  still  may  wear  without  dif- 
ferentiating herself  from  her  fellows. 

The  short  skirt  and  jacket,  the  shirt 
waist  and  stout  boots,  a  woman  is  allowed 
to-day,  are  among  the  good  things  which 
the  Woman's  Rights  movement  of  the 
40's  and  50's  helped  secure  for  us.  When 
those  able  leaders  made  their  attack  on 
man,  demanding  that  the  world  in  which 
he  moved  be  opened  to  them,  they  were 
quick  enough  to  see  that  if  they  suc- 
ceeded in  their  undertaking  they  would 
be  hampered  by  their  clothes.  They 
revolted  !  True,  they  did  not  voice  this 
revolt  in  their  historic  list  of  "injuries 
and  usurpations  on  the  part  of  man 
toward  woman."  They  did  not  say,  "He 
131 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

has  compelled  her  to  hamper  herself  with 
skirts  and  stays,  to  decorate  her  head  with 
rats  and  puffs,  to  paint  her  face  with  poi- 
sonous compounds,  to  walk  the  street  in 
footwear  which  is  neither  suitable  nor 
comfortable  !" 

This  statement,  however,  would  have 
had  the  same  quality  of  truth  as  several 
which  were  included  in  the  "List  of 
Grievances";  the  same  as  the  declara- 
tion :  "  He  has  compelled  her  to  submit 
to  laws  in  the  formation  of  which  she 
has  had  no  voice,"  or,  "He  has  denied  her 
the  facilities  for  obtaining  a  thorough 
education,  all  colleges  being  closed  against 
her." 

Dress  reformers  were  admitted  to  the 
ranks  of  the  agitators.  The  initial  revolt 
was  thoroughgoing.  They  discarded  the 
corset,  discarded  it  when  it  was  still 
improper  to  speak  the  word  !  They  cut 
off  their  hair,  cut  it  off  in  a  day  when  every 
132 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

woman  owned  a  chignon.  They  dis- 
carded the  corset,  cut  off  their  hair,  and 
adopted  bloomers  ! 

The  story  of  the  bloomer  is  piquant. 
It  was  launched  and  worn.  It  became  the 
subject  of  platform  oratory  and  had  its 
organ.  Why  is  it  not  worn  to-day  ?  No 
woman  who  has  ever  masqueraded  in 
man's  dress  or  donned  it  for  climbing 
will  ever  forget  the  freedom  of  it.  Yet 
the  only  woman  in  the  Christian  world 
who  ever  wore  it  at  once  naturally  and 
with  that  touch  of  coquetry  which  is 
necessary  to  carry  it  off,  as  far  as  this 
writer's  personal  observation  goes,  was 
Madame  Dieulafoy,  and  Madame  Dieu- 
lafoy  was  protected  by  the  French  gov- 
ernment and  an  exclusive  circle. 

Bloomers   proved  too  much  for  even 

the  courage  of  dear  Miss  Anthony.     For 

two  years  she  wore  them,  and  then  with 

tears   and   lamentations   resigned   them. 

133 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

In  that  resignation  Miss  Anthony  paid 
tribute,  unconsciously  no  doubt,  to  some- 
thing deeper  than  she  ever  grasped  in 
the  woman  question.  Her  vahant  soul 
met  its  master  in  her  own  nature,  but 
she  did  not  recognize  it.  She  abandoned 
her  convenient  and  becoming  costume 
because  of  prejudice,  she  said.  What 
other  prejudice  ever  dismayed  her  !  She 
thrived  on  fighting  them;  she  met  her 
woman's  soul,  and  did  not  know  it ! 

But  from  the  experiments  and  blunders 
and  travail  of  some  of  these  noble  and 
early  militants  over  the  dress  question, 
has  come,  as  I  have  said,  our  present 
useful,  and  probably  permanent  type  of 
street  suit.  In  this  particular  the  Amer- 
ican woman  has  achieved  a  genuine 
democratization  of  her  clothes.  The  ex- 
perience of  the  last  two  years  —  fashion's 
open  attempt  to  make  the  walking  suit 
useless  by  tightening  the  skirts,  and 
134 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

bizarre  by  elaborate  decorations,  has 
in  the  main  failed.  Here,  then,  is  a 
standard  established,  and  established  on 
one  of  the  great  principles  of  sensible 
clothing,  and  that  is  fitness.  It  shows 
that  the  true  attack  on  the  tyranny  and 
corruption  of  clothes  lies  in  the  establish- 
ment of  principles. 

These  principles  are,  briefly : — 

The  fitness  of  dress  depends  upon  the 
occasion. 

.  The  beauty  of  dress  depends  upon  line 
and  color. 

The  ethics  of  dress  depends  upon 
quality  and  the  relation  of  cost  to  one's 
means. 

In  time  we  may  get  into  the  heads  of 
all  women,  rich  and  poor,  that  an  open- 
work stocking  and  low  shoe  for  winter 
street  wear  are  as  unfit  as  they  all  con- 
cede a  trailing  skirt  to  be.  In  time  we 
may  even  hope  to  train  the  eye  until  it 
135 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

recognizes  the  difference  between  a  beauti- 
ful and  a  grotesque  form,  between  a  flow- 
ing and  a  jagged  line.  In  time  we  may 
restore  the  sense  of  quality,  which  our 
grandmothers  certainly  had,  and  which 
almost  every  European  peasant  brings 
with  her  to  this  country. 

These  principles  are  teachable  things. 
Let  her  once  grasp  them  and  the  vagaries 
of  style  will  become  as  distasteful  as 
poor  drawing  does  to  one  whose  eye  has 
learned  what  is  correct,  as  lying  is  to  one 
who  has  cultivated  the  taste  for  the  truth. 

Martha  Berry  tells  of  an  illuminating 
experience  in  her  school  of  Southern 
mountain  girls.  She  had  taken  great 
pains  to  teach  them  correct  standards 
and  principles  of  dress.  She  had  been 
careful  to  see  that  simplicity  and  quality 
and  fitness  were  all  that  they  saw  in  the 
dress  of  their  teachers.  Then  one  day 
they  had  visitors,  fashionable  visitors,  in 
136 


,A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

hobble  skirts  and  strange  hats  and  jingling 
with  many  ornaments.  They  were  good 
and  interesting  women,  and  they  talked 
sympathetically  and  well  to  the  girls. 
Miss  Berry  was  crushed.  "What  will  the 
girls  think  of  my  teachings  ? "  she  asked 
herself.  "They  will  believe  I  do  not 
know."  But  that  night  one  of  her  assist- 
ants said  to  her:  "I  have  just  overheard 
the  girls  discussing  our  visitors.  They 
liked  them  so  much,  but  they  are  saying 
that  it  is  such  a  pity  that  they  could  not 
have  had  you  to  teach  them  how  to  dress.** 
As  a  method  of  education,  instruction 
in  the  principles  of  dress  is  admirable 
for  a  girl.  Through  it  she  can  be  made 
to  grasp  the  truth  which  women  so 
generally  suspect  to-day;  that  is,  the 
importance  of  the  common  and  universal 
things  of  life;  the  fact  that  all  these 
everyday  processes  are  the  expressions 
of  the  great  underlying  truths  of  life. 
137 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

A  girl  can  be  taught,  too,  through  this 
matter  of  dress,  as  directly  perhaps  as 
through  anything  that  concerns  her,  the 
importance  of  studying  human  follies ! 
Follies  grow  out  of  powerful  human 
instincts,  ineradicable  elements  of  human 
nature.  They  would  not  exist  if  there 
were  not  at  the  bottom  of  them  some 
impulse  of  nature,  right  and  beautiful 
and  essential.  The  folly  of  woman's 
dress  lies  not  in  her  instinct  to  make  her- 
self beautiful,  it  lies  in  her  ignorance  of 
the  principles  of  beauty,  of  the  intimate 
and  essential  connection  between  utility 
and  beauty.  It  lies  in  the  pitiful  assump- 
tion that  she  can  achieve  her  end  by 
imitation,  that  she  can  be  the  thing  she 
envies  if  she  look  like  that  thing. 

The  matter  of  dress  is  the  more  im- 
portant, because  bound  up  with  it  is  a 
whole  grist  of  social  and  economic  prob- 
lems.    It  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  prob- 
138 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

lem  of  the  cost  of  living,  of  woman's 
wages,  of  wasteful  industries,  of  the 
social  evil  itself.  It  is  a  woman's  most 
direct  weapon  against  industrial  abuses, 
her  all-powerful  weapon  as  a  consumer. 
At  the  time  of  the  Lawrence  strike.  Miss 
Vida  Scudder,  of  Wellesley  College,  is 
reported  to  have  said  in  a  talk  to  a  group 
of  women  citizens  in  Lawrence :  — 

"I  speak  for  thousands  besides  myself 
when  I  say  that  I  would  rather  never 
again  wear  a  thread  of  woolen  than  know 
my  garments  had  been  woven  at  the  cost 
of  such  misery  as  I  have  seen  and  known, 
past  the  shadow  of  a  doubt,  to  have 
existed  in  this  town." 

Miss  Scudder  might  have  been  more 
emphatic  and  still  have  been  entirely 
within  the  limit  of  plain  obligation;  she 
might  have  said,  "I  will  never  again 
wear  a  thread  of  woolen  woven  at  the 
cost  of  such  misery  as  exists  in  this  town." 
139 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Women  will  not  be  doing  their  duty,  as 
citizens  in  this  country,  until  they  recog- 
nize fully  the  obligations  laid  upon  them 
by  their  control  of  consumption. 

The  very  heart  of  the  question  of  the 
dress  is,  then,  economic  and  social.  It 
is  one  of  those  great  everyday  matters  on 
which  the  moral  and  physical  well-being 
of  society  rests.  One  of  those  matters, 
which,  rightly  understood,  fill  the  every- 
day life  with  big  meanings,  show  it 
related  to  every  great  movement  for  the 
betterment  of  man. 

Like  all  of  the  great  interests  in  the 
Business  of  Being  a  Woman,  it  is  primarily 
an  individual  problem,  and  every  woman 
who  solves  it  for  herself,  that  is,  arrives 
at  what  may  be  called  a  sound  mode  of 
dress,  makes  a  real  contribution  to  society. 
There  is  a  tendency  to  overlook  the  value 
of  the  individual  solution  of  the  problems 
of  life,  and  yet,  the  successful  individual 
140 


A  WOMAN  AND  HER  RAIMENT 

solution  is  perhaps  the  most  genuine  and 
fundamental  contribution  a  man  or 
woman  can  make.  The  end  of  living  is 
a  life  —  fair,  sound,  sweet,  complete. 
The  vast  machinery  of  life  to  which  we 
give  so  much  attention,  our  governments 
and  societies,  our  politics  and  wrangling, 
is  nothing  in  itself.  It  is  only  a  series  of 
contrivances  to  insure  the  chance  to 
grow  a  life.  He  who  proves  that  he 
can  conquer  his  conditions,  can  adjust 
himself  to  the  machinery  in  which  he  finds 
himself,  he  is  the  most  genuine  of  social 
servants.  He  realizes  the  thing  for  which 
we  talk  and  scheme,  and  so  proves  that 
our  dreams  are  not  vain  ! 


141 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  WOMAN  AND   DEMOCRACY 

The  one  notion  that  democracy  has 
succeeded  in  planting  firmly  in  the  mind 
of  the  average  American  citizen  is  his 
right  and  duty  to  rise  in  the  world. 
Tested  by  this  conception  the  American 
woman  is  an  ideal  democrat.  Give  her 
a  ghost  of  a  chance  and  she  almost  never 
fails  to  better  herself  materially  and 
socially.  Nor  can  she  be  said  to  do  it 
by  the  clumsy  methods  we  describe  as 
"pushing."  She  does  it  by  a  legitimate, 
if  rather  literal,  application  of  the  national 
formula  for  rising,  —  get  schooling  and 
get  money. 

The  average  American  man  reverses 
the  order  of  the  terms  in  the  formula.  He 
142 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

believes  more  in  money.  The  time  that 
boys  and  girls  are  kept  in  school  after 
the  fourteen-  or  sixteen-year-age  limit  is 
generally  due  to  the  insistence  of  the 
mother,  her  confidence  that  the  more  edu- 
cation, the  better  the  life  chance.  What 
it  amounts  to  is  that  the  man  has  more 
faith  in  life  as  a  teacher,  the  woman  more 
faith  in  schools.  Both,  however,  seek  the 
same  goal,  pin  their  faith  to  the  same 
tools.  Both  take  it  for  granted  that  if 
they  work  out  the  formulas,  they  thereby 
earn  and  will  receive  letters  patent  to 
the  aristocracy  of  the  democracy  ! 

The  weakness  of  this  popular  concep- 
tion of  the  democratic  scheme  is  that  it 
gives  too  much  attention  to  what  a  man 
gets  and  too  little  to  what  he  gives. 
Democracy  more  than  any  other  scheme 
under  which  men  have  tried  to  live  to- 
gether depends  on  what  each  returns  — 
returns  not  in  material  but  in  spiritual 
143 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

things.  Democracy  is  not  a  shelter,  a 
garment,  a  cash  account;  it  is  a  spirit. 
The  real  test  of  its  followers  must  be 
sought  in  their  attitude  of  mind  toward 
life,  labor,  and  their  fellows. 

Where  does  the  average  American 
woman  come  out  in  applying  this  test  ? 
Take  her  attitude  toward  labor,  —  where 
does  it  place  her  ?  Labor  according  to 
democracy  is  a  badge  of  respectability. 
You  cannot  poach  or  sponge  in  a  democ- 
racy; if  you  do,  you  violate  the  funda- 
mental right  of  the  other  man.  You 
cannot  ask  him  to  help  support  you  by 
indirect  or  concealed  devices ;  if  you  do, 
you  are  hampering  the  free  opportunity 
the  scheme  promises  him. 

Moreover,  the  kind  of  work  you  do 
must  not  demean  you.  Nothing  useful  is 
menial.  It  is  in  the  quality  of  the  work 
and  the  spirit  you  give  it  that  the  test 
lies.  Poor  work  brings  disrespect  and  so 
144 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

hurts  not  only  you  but  the  whole  mass. 
Contempt  for  a  task  violates  the  principle 
because  it  is  contempt  for  a  thing  which 
the  system  recognizes  as  useful.  Classi- 
fication based  on  tasks  falls  down  in  a 
democracy.  A  poor  lawyer  falls  below 
a  good  clerk,  a  poor  teacher  below  a  good 
housemaid,  since  one  renders  a  sound 
and  the  other  an  unsound  service. 

Now  this  ideal  of  labor  it  was  for  the 
woman  to  work  out  in  the  household. 
To  do  this  she  must  reconstruct  the  ideas 
to  which  she  and  all  her  society  had  been 
trained.  In  the  nature  of  the  task  there 
could  be  no  rules  for  it.  It  could  be 
accomplished  only  by  creating  in  the 
household  a  genuine  democratic  spirit. 
This  meant  that  she  must  bring  herself  to 
look  upon  domestic  service  as  a  dignified 
employment  in  no  way  demeaning  the 
person  who  performed  it.  Quite  as  dif- 
ficult, she  must  infuse  into  those  who 
L  145 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

performed  the  labor  of  the  household  re- 
spect and  pride  in  their  service. 

What  has  happened  ?  Has  the  woman 
democratized  the  department  of  labor 
she  controls  ?  If  we  are  to  measure  her 
understanding  of  the  system  under  which 
she  lives  by  what  she  has  done  with  her 
own  particular  labor  problem,  we  must 
set  her  down  as  a  poor  enough  democrat. 
This  great  department  of  national  activity 
is  generally  (though  by  no  means  univer- 
sally) in  a  poorer  estate  to-day  than  ever 
before  in  the  history  of  the  country; 
that  is,  tested  by  the  ideals  of  labor 
toward  which  we  are  supposed  to  be  work- 
ing, it  shows  less  progress. 

Instead  of  being  dignified,  it  has  been 
demeaned.  No  other  honest  work  in  the 
country  so  belittles  a  woman  socially  as 
housework  performed  for  money.  It  is 
the  only  field  of  labor  which  has  scarcely 
felt  the  touch  of  the  modern  labor  move- 
146 


THE   WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

ment ;  the  only  one  where  the  hours,  con- 
ditions, and  wages  are  not  being  attacked 
generally;  the  only  one  in  which  there 
is  no  organization  or  standardization,  no 
training,  no  regular  road  of  progress. 
It  is  the  only  field  of  labor  in  which  there 
seems  to  be  a  general  tendency  to  abandon 
the  democratic  notion  and  return  frankly 
to  the  standards  of  the  aristocratic  regime. 
The  multiplication  of  livery,  the  tipping 
system,  the  terms  of  address,  all  show  an 
increasing  imitation  of  the  old  world's 
methods.  Unhappily  enough,  they  are 
used  with  little  or  none  of  the  old  world's 
ease.  Being  imitations  and  not  natural 
growths,  they,  of  course,  cannot  be. 

More  serious  still  is  the  relation  which 
has  been  shown  to  exist  between  crimi- 
nality and  household  occupations.  Noth- 
ing, indeed,  which  recent  investigation  has 
established  ought  to  startle  the  American 
woman  more.  Contrary  to  public  opin- 
147 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

ion,  it  is  not  the  factory  and  shop  which 
are  making  the  greatest  number  of  women 
offenders  of  all  kinds ;  it  is  the  household. 
In  a  recent  careful  study  of  over  3000 
women  criminals,  the  Bureau  of  Labor 
found  that  80  per  cent  came  directly  from 
their  own  homes  or  from  the  traditional 
pursuits  of  women  !  ^ 

The  anomaly  is  the  more  painful  be- 
cause women  are  so  active  in  trying  to 
better  the  conditions  in  trades  which  men 
control.  Feminine  circles  everywhere 
have  been  convulsed  with  sympathy  for 
shop  and  factory  girls.  Intelligent  and 
persistent  efforts  are  making  to  reach 
and  aid  them.  This  is,  of  course,  right, 
and  it  would  be  a  national  calamity  if 
such  organizations  as  the  Woman's  Trade 
Union  League  and  the  Consumer's  League 

*  Report  on  Condition  of  Woman  and  Child  Wage  Earners 
in  the  United  States,  Vol.  XV.  Relation  between  Occupation 
and  Criminality  of  Women.     1911. 

148 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

should  lose  anything  of  their  vigor.  But 
the  need  of  the  classes  they  reach  is  really 
less  than  the  need  of  household  workers. 
In  the  first  place,  the  number  affected  is 
far  less. 

It  is  customary,  in  presenting  the  case 
of  the  shop  and  factory  girl,  to  speak  of 
them  as  "an  army  7,000,000  strong." 
It  is  a  misleading  exaggeration.  The 
whole  number  of  American  women  and 
girls  over  ten  years  of  age  earning  their 
living  wholly  or  partially  is  about  7,000,- 
000.^     Of  this  number  from  20  per  cent 

^  The  number  of  people  in  1910  in  what  is  called  "gainful 
occupations"  has  not  as  yet  been  compiled  by  the  Census 
Bureau.  This  figure  of  7,000,000  is  arrived  at  by  the  follow- 
ing method,  suggested  to  the  writer  by  Director  Durand.  It 
is  known  that  there  are  about  44,500,000  females  in  the  pres- 
ent population.  Now  in  1900  there  were  about  143^  per  cent 
of  all  the  giris  and  women  in  the  country  over  ten  years  of  age 
at  work  a  part  or  all  of  the  time.  Apply  to  the  new  figure  this 
proportion,  and  you  have  between  six  and  seven  millions,  which 
is  called  7,000,000  here,  on  the  supposition  that  the  proportion 
may  have  increased.  The  percentage  of  women  in  each  of 
the  various  occupations  in  1900  is  assumed  still  to  exist. 
149 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

to  25  per  cent  belong  to  the  "army"  in 
shops  and  factories;  moreover,  a  goodly 
percentage  of  this  proportion  are  ac- 
countants, bookkeepers,  and  stenogra- 
phers, —  a  class  which  on  the  whole  may 
be  said  to  be  able  to  look  after  its  own 
needs.  The  number  in  domestic  service 
is  nearly  twice  as  great,  something  like 
40  per  cent  of  the  7,000,000. 

There  are  almost  as  many  dressmakers, 
milliners,  and  seamstresses  as  there  are 
factory  operators  in  this  7,000,000.  There 
are  nearly  twice  as  many  earning  their 
living  in  dairies,  greenhouses,  and  gardens 
as  there  are  in  shops  and  offices. 

The  greater  number  in  domestic  service 
is  not  what  gives  this  class  its  greater 
importance.  Its  chief  importance  comes 
from  the  fact  that  it  is  in  a  permanent 
woman's  employment ;  that  is,  the  house- 
hold worker  becomes  on  marriage  a 
housekeeper  and  in  this  country  fre- 
150 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

quently  an  employer  of  labor.  The  in- 
telligence and  the  ideals  which  she  will 
give  to  her  homemaking  will  depend 
almost  entirely  on  what  she  has  seen  in 
the  houses  where  she  has  worked;  that 
is,  our  domestic  service  is  self-perpetuating, 
and  upon  it  American  homes  are  in  great 
numbers  being  annually  founded.  In  sharp 
contrast  to  this  permanent  character  of 
housework  is  the  transientness  of  factory 
and  shop  work.  The  average  period 
which  a  girl  gives  to  this  kind  of  labor  is 
probably  less  than  five  years.  What 
she  learns  has  little  or  no  relation  to  her 
future  as  a  housekeeper  —  indeed,  the 
tendency  is  rather  to  unfit  than  to  fit 
her  for  a  home. 

But  why  is  the  American  woman  not 
stirred  by  these  facts  ?  Why  does  she 
not  recognize  their  meaning  and  grapple 
with  her  labor  problem  ?  It  is  certain 
that  at  the  beginning  of  the  republic 
151 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

she  did  have  a  pretty  clear  idea  of  the 
kind  of  household  revolution  the  country- 
needed.  Our  great-grandmothers,  that 
is,  the  serious  ones  among  them,  made  a 
brave  dash  at  it.  There  is  no  family,  at 
least  of  New  England  tradition,  who 
does  not  know  the  methods  they  adopted. 
They  changed  the  nomenclature.  There 
were  to  be  no  more  "servants"  —  we 
were  to  have  helpers.  There  were  to  be 
no  divisions  in  the  household.  The  helper 
was  to  sit  at  the  table,  at  the  fireside. 
(They  thought  to  change  the  nature  of  a 
relation  as  old  as  the  world  by  changing 
its  name  and  form.)  It  was  like  the 
French  Revolutionists'  attempt  to  make 
a  patriot  by  taking  away  his  ruffles  and 
shoe  buckles  and  calling  him  "citizen"  ! 
Of  course  it  failed.  The  family  meal, 
the  fireside  hour,  are  personal  and  private 
institutions  in  a  home.  Much  of  the 
success  of  the  family  in  building  up  an 
152 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

intimate  comradeship  depends  upon  pre- 
serving them.  We  admit  friends  to  them 
as  a  proof  of  affection,  strangers  as  a 
proof  of  our  regard.  The  notion  that 
those  who  come  into  a  household  solely  to 
aid  in  its  labor  should  be  admitted  into 
personal  relations  which  depend  for  their 
life  upon  privacy  and  affection,  was  always 
fantastic.  It  could  not  endure,  because 
it  violated  something  as  important  as 
the  dignity  of  labor,  and  that  was  the 
sacredness  of  personal  privacy.  More- 
over, it  was  bound  to  fail  because  it 
made  the  dignity  of  labor  depend  on 
artificial  things  —  such  as  the  name  by 
which  one  is  called,  the  place  where  one 
sits. 

The  good  sense  of  the  country  might 
very  well  have  regulated  whatever  was 
artificial  in  the  attempt,  if  it  had  not  been 
for  the  crushing  interference  of  slavery. 
In  the  South  all  service  was  performed  by 
153 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

slaves.  In  many  parts  of  the  North,  at 
the  founding  of  the  repubhc,  in  Connecti- 
cut, in  New  York,  New  Jersey,  slaves 
were  held.  It  was  practically  impossible 
to  work  out  a  democratic  system  of 
domestic  service  side  by  side  with  this 
institution. 

Slavery  passed,  but  we  were  impeded  by 
the  fact  that,  liberated,  the  slave  was  still 
a  slave  in  spirit  and  that  his  employer. 
North  and  South,  was  still  an  aristocrat  in 
her  treatment  of  him.  With  this  situa- 
tion to  cope  with,  the  woman's  labor 
problem  was  still  further  complicated  by 
immigration. 

For  years  we  have  been  overrun  by 
thousands  of  untrained  girls  who  are 
probably  to  be  heads  of  American  homes 
and  mothers  of  American  citizens.  Most 
of  them  are  of  good,  healthy,  honest, 
industrious  stock,  but  they  are  ignorant 
of  our  ways  and  ideas.  The  natural 
154 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

place  for  these  girls  to  get  their  initiation 
into  American  democracy  is  in  the  Ameri- 
can household.  The  duty  of  American 
women  toward  these  foreign  girls  is 
plainly  to  help  them  understand  our 
ideals.  The  difficulty  of  this  is  apparent ; 
but  the  failure  to  accomplish  it  has  been 
due  less  to  its  difficulty  than  to  the  fact 
that  not  one  woman  in  a  thousand  has 
recognized  that  she  has  an  obligation  to 
make  a  fit  citizen  of  the  girl  who  comes 
into  her  home. 

Generally  speaking,  the  foreign  servant 
girl  has  been  exploited  in  this  country 
almost  if  not  quite  as  ruthlessly  and 
unintelligently  as  the  foreign  factory  girl 
and  the  foreign  steel  mill  worker.  Do- 
mestic service,  which  ought  to  be  the  best 
school  for  the  newcomer,  has  become  the 
worst;  exploited,  she  learns  to  exploit; 
suspected,  she  learns  to  suspect.  The 
result  has  been  that  the  girl  has  soon 
155 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

acquired  a  confused  and  grotesque  notion 
of  her  place.  She  soon  becomes  insolent 
and  dissatisfied,  grows  more  and  more 
indifferent  to  the  quality  of  her  work  and 
to  the  cultivation  of  right  relations. 

What  we  have  lost  in  our  treatment  of 
the  immigrant  women  can  never  be 
regained.  We  forget  that  almost  in- 
variably these  girls  have  the  habit  of 
thrift.  They  have  never  known  any- 
thing else.  Thrift  as  a  principle  is  in- 
grained in  them.  But  the  American 
household  is  notoriously  thriftless.  As  a 
rule  it  destroys  the  quality  in  the  un- 
trained immigrant  girl.  It  is  American 
not  to  care  for  expense  —  and  she  accepts 
the  method  —  as  far  as  her  mistress' 
goods  are  concerned  —  if  not  her  own. 

The  general  stupid  assumption  that 
because  the  immigrant  girl  does  not  know 
our  ways  she  knows  nothing,  has  de- 
prived us  of  much  that  she  might  have 
156 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

contributed  to  our  domestic  arts  and 
sciences.  It  is  with  her  as  it  is  with  any 
newcomer  in  a  strange  land  of  strange 
tongue  —  she  is  shy,  dreads  ridicule. 
Instead  of  encouraging  her  to  preserve  and 
develop  that  which  she  has  learned  at 
home,  we  drive  her  to  abandon  it  by  our 
ignorant  assumption  that  she  knows  noth- 
ing worth  our  learning.  The  case  of 
peasant  handicraft  is  in  point.  It  is  only 
recently  that  we  have  begun  to  realize  that 
most  women  immigrants  know  some  kind 
of  beautiful  handicraft  which  they  have 
entirely  dropped  for  fear  of  being  laughed 
at. 

A  very  frequent  excuse  for  the  lack  of 
pains  that  the  average  woman  gives  to  the 
training  of  the  raw  girl  is  that  she  marries 
as  soon  as  she  becomes  useful.  But  is  it 
not  part  of  the  woman's  business  in  this 
democracy  to  help  the  newcomer  to  an 
independent  position  ?  Is  it  not  part  of 
157 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

her  business  to  help  settle  her  servants 
in  matrimony  ?  Certainly  any  large  and 
serious  conception  of  her  business  must 
include  this  obligation. 

It  is  the  failure  to  recognize  opportuni- 
ties for  public  service  of  this  kind  that 
makes  the  woman  say  her  life  is  narrow. 
It  is  parallel  to  her  failure  to  understand 
the  relation  of  household  economy  to 
national  economy.  She  seems  to  lack 
the  imagination  to  relate  her  problem 
to  the  whole  problem.  She  will  read 
books  and  follow  lecture  courses  on  Labor 
and  come  home  to  resent  the  narrowness 
of  her  life,  unconscious  that  she  per- 
sonally has  the  labor  problem  on  her  own 
hands  and  that  her  failure  to  see  that 
fact  is  complicating  daily  the  problems 
of  the  nation.  It  is  the  old  false  idea 
that  the  interesting  and  important  thing 
is  somewhere  else  —  never  at  home  — 
while  the  truth  is  that  the  only  interesting 
158 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

and  important  thing  for  any  one  of  us 
is  in  mastering  our  own  particular  situa- 
tion, —  moreover,  the  only  real  contribu- 
tion we  ever  make  comes  in  doing  that. 

The  failure  to  dignify  and  profession- 
alize household  labor  is  particularly  hard 
on  the  unskilled  girl  of  little  education 
who  respects  herself,  has  pretty  clear 
ideas  of  her  *' rights"  under  our  system 
of  government,  and  who  expects  to  make 
something  of  herself.  There  are  tens  of 
thousands  of  such  in  the  country;  very 
many  of  them  realize  clearly  the  many 
advantages  of  household  labor.  They 
know  that  it  ought  to  be  more  healthful, 
is  better  paid,  is  more  interesting  because 
more  varied.  They  see  its  logical  rela- 
tion to  the  future  to  which  they  look  for- 
ward. 

But  such  a  girl  feels  keenly  the  cost  to 
herself  of  undertaking  what  she  instinc- 
tively feels  ought  to  be  for  her  the  better 
159 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

task.  She  knows  the  standards  and  con- 
ditions are  a  matter  of  chance;  that, 
while  she  may  receive  considerate  treat- 
ment in  one  place,  in  another  there  will 
be  no  apparent  consciousness  that  she  is 
a  human  being.  She  laiows  and  dreads 
the  loneliness  of  the  average  "place." 
"It's  breaking  my  heart  I  was,"  sobbed 
an  intelligent  Irish  girl,  serving  a  term 
for  drunkenness  begun  in  the  kitchen, 
"alone  all  day  long  with  never  a  one  to 
pass  a  good  word."  She  finds  herself 
cut  off  from  most  of  the  benefits  which 
are  provided  for  other  wage-earning  girls. 
She  finds  girls'  clubhouses  generally  are 
closed  to  her.  She  is  the  pariah  among 
workers. 

What  is  there  for  this  girl  but  the 
factory  or  the  shop  ?  Yet  her  presence 
there  is  a  disaster  for  the  whole  labor 
system,  for  she  is  a  cheap  laborer  —  cheap 
not  because  she  is  a  poor  laborer  —  she  is 
160 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

not;  generally  she  is  an  admirable  one 
—  quick  to  learn,  faithful  to  discharge. 
Her  weakness  in  trade  is  that  she  is  a 
transient  who  takes  no  interest  in  fitting 
herself  for  an  advanced  position.  The 
demonstration  of  this  statement  is  found 
in  a  town  like  Fall  River,  where  the  ad- 
mirable textile  school  has  only  a  rare 
woman  student,  although  boys  and  men 
tax  its  capacity.  There  is  no  object  for 
the  average  girl  to  take  the  training. 
She  looks  forward  to  a  different  life. 
The  working  girl  has  still  to  be  convinced 
of  the  "aristocracy  of  celibacy"  ! 

No  more  difficult  or  important  under- 
taking awaits  the  American  woman  than 
to  accept  the  challenge  to  democratize 
her  own  special  field  of  labor.  It  is  in 
doing  this  that  she  is  going  to  make  her 
chief  contribution  to  solving  the  problem 
of  woman  in  industry.  It  is  in  doing  this 
that  she  is  going  to  learn  the  meaning  of 

K  161 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

democracy.  It  is  an  undertaking  in 
which  every  woman  has  a  direct  individ- 
ual part  —  just  as  every  man  has  a  direct 
part  in  the  democratization  of  pubUc 
life. 

Individual  effort  aside,  though  it  is  the 
most  fundamental,  she  has  various  special 
channels  of  power  through  which  she 
can  work  —  her  clubs,  for  instance.  If 
the  vast  machinery  of  the  Federation  of 
Woman's  Clubs  could  be  turned  to  this 
problem  of  the  democratization  of  do- 
mestic service,  what  an  awakening  might 
we  not  hope  for  !  Yet  it  is  doubtful  if 
it  will  be  through  the  trained  woman's 
organizations  that  the  needed  revolution 
will  come.  It  will  come,  as  always,  from 
the  ranks  of  the  workers. 

Already  there  are  signs  that  the  wom- 
an's labor  organizations  are  willing  to 
recognize  the  inherent  dignity  of  house- 
hold service.  And  this  is  as  it  should 
16£ 


THE  WOMAN  AND  DEMOCRACY 

be.  The  woman  who  labors  should  be 
the  one  to  recognize  that  all  labor  is  per 
se  equally  honorable  —  that  there  is  no 
stigma  in  any  honestly  performed,  use- 
ful service.  If  she  is  to  bring  to  the 
labor  world  the  regeneration  she  dreams, 
she  must  begin  not  by  saying  that  the 
shop  girl,  the  clerk,  the  teacher,  are  in  a 
higher  class  than  the  cook,  the  waitress, 
the  maid,  but  that  we  are  all  laborers 
alike,  sisters  by  virtue  of  the  service  we 
are  rendering  society.  That  is,  labor 
should  be  the  last  to  recognize  the  canker 
of  caste.  ^ 

^  The  National  Women's  Trades  Union  League  has  domes* 
tic  workers  among  its  members,  though  not  as  yet,  I  believe, 
in  any  large  numbers.  Its  officials  are  strong  believers  in  a 
Domestic  Workers'  Union.  There  are  several  such  unions  in 
New  Zealand,  and  they  have  done  much  to  regulate  houra, 
conditions,  and  wages. 


16S 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE    HOMELESS    DAUGHTER 

One  of  the  severest  strains  society 
makes  on  human  life  is  that  of  adapting 
itself  to  ever  changing  conditions ;  yes- 
terday it  dragged  us  in  a  stagecoach ; 
to-day  it  hurls  us  across  country  in 
limited  expresses ;  to-morrow  we  shall 
fly !  Once  twilight  and  darkness  were 
without,  shadows  and  dim  recesses  with- 
in; now,  wherever  men  gather  there  is 
one  continuous  blazing  day.  He  who 
would  keep  his  task  abreast  with  the 
day  must  accept  speed  and  light;  for 
the  law  is,  think,  feel,  do  in  the  terms  of 
your  day,  if  you  would  keep  your  hold  on 
your  day. 

It  is  a  law  often  resented  as  if  it  were 
an  immorality,  but  those  who  refuse  the 
164 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

new  way  on  principle,  confuse  form  with 
principle.  It  is  the  form  which  changes, 
not  the  essence.  The  few  great  under- 
lying elements  from  which  character  and 
happiness  are  evolved  are  permanent  — 
their  mutations  are  endless.  Dull- 
minded,  we  take  the  mutations  to  mean 
shifting  of  principle.  That  is,  we  do  not 
square  up  by  truth,  but  by  the  forms  of 
truth. 

The  Woman's  Business  has  always 
suffered  from  lack  of  facility  in  adapting 
itself  to  new  forms  of  expression.  The 
natural  task  found,  a  method  of  handling 
it  in  a  fashion  sufficiently  acceptable 
to  prevent  family  revolts  mastered,  and 
the  woman  usually  is  as  fixed  as  a  star 
in  its  orbit.  She  resents  changes  of 
method,  new  interpretations,  and  fresh 
expressions.  It  is  she,  not  man,  who 
stands  an  immovable  mountain  in  the 
path  of  militant  feminism. 
165 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

In  this  course  she  is  following  her 
nature.  An  instinct  more  powerful  than 
logic  tells  her  that  she  must  preserve 
the  thing  she  is  making,  that  center 
for  which  she  is  responsible,  that  place 
where  her  child  is  born  and  reared,  where 
her  mate  retreats,  to  be  reassured  that 
the  effort  to  which  he  has  committed 
himself  is  worth  while,  where  all  the  com- 
munity to  which  she  belongs  is  served 
and  strengthened.  If  this  place  is  pre- 
served, she  must  do  it.  Man,  an  experi- 
menter and  adventurer,  cannot. 

Changes  she  fears.  She  sees  them  as 
disturbers  of  her  plans  and  her  ideals. 
But  the  changes  will  not  stay.  They 
gather  about  her  retreat,  beat  at  the 
doors,  creep  in  at  the  windows,  win  her 
husband  and  children  from  her  very 
arms.  The  home  on  which  she  depended 
to  keep  them  becomes  impotent.  While 
she  stands  an  implacable  guardian  of  a 
166 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

form  of  truth,  truth  has  moved  on,  broad- 
ened its  outlook,  and  clothed  itself  in  new 
expressions. 

It  is  entirely  understandable  that  the 
woman  who  sees  herself  left  behind  with 
her  dead  gods  should  cry  out  against 
change  as  the  ruin  of  her  hopes.  It  is 
equally  understandable  that  those  who 
find  themselves  adrift  should  doubt  the 
home  as  an  institution.  At  the  bottom 
of  the  revolt  of  thousands  of  our  "  uneasy 
women"  of  to-day  lies  this  doubt.  The 
home  failed  them,  and  with  the  logic  of 
limited  experience  they  cast  it  out  of 
their  calculations. 

But  the  home  is  one  of  the  unescapable 
facts  of  nature  and  society  —  unescap- 
able because  the  child  demands  it.  One 
of  the  earliest  convictions  of  the  child 
is  that  he  has  a  right  to  a  home.  To  him 
it  appears  as  the  great  necessity.  He 
cannot  see  himself  outside  of  it.  To  be 
167 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

at  large  in  the  world  throws  him  into 
panic.  The  sacrifices  and  pains  very 
young  children  suffer  uncomplainingly, 
particularly  in  great  cities  and  factory 
towns,  is  a  pathetic  enough  demonstra- 
tion of  what  the  word  means  to  them. 
Mere  children  by  the  hundreds  support 
families  terrified  by  the  thought  of  their 
collapse.  The  orphan  forever  dreams  of 
the  day  when  a  home  will  be  found  for 
him.  The  child  whose  parents  seek  free- 
dom, leaving  him  to  school  or  servants, 
never  fails  to  nourish  a  sense  of  injustice. 
Whatever  one  generation  may  decide  as 
to  the  futility  or  burdensomeness  of  the 
home,  the  oncoming  child  will  force  its 
return. 

To  keep  this  permanent  place  abreast 
with  growing  truth,  that  is  the  obligation 
of  the  woman.  It  is  the  failure  to  do  this 
that  produces  what  we  may  call  the  home- 
less daughter;  that  girl  who  loved  and 
168 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

often  served  to  the  point  of  folly,  finds 
herself  in  a  group  where  none  of  the  im- 
perative needs  the  day  has  awakened  in 
her  are  met. 

One  of  the  first  of  these  needs  is  for 
what  we  call  "economic  independence." 
The  spirit  of  our  day  and  of  our  system 
of  government  is  personal,  material  in- 
dependence for  all.  Under  the  old  re- 
gime the  girl  had  her  economic  place. 
The  family  was  a  small  community.  It 
provided  for  most  of  its  own  wants,  hence 
the  girl  must  be  taught  household  arts 
and  science,  all  of  the  fine  traditional 
knowledge  and  skill  which  made,  not 
drudges,  but  skilled  managers,  skilled 
cooks  and  needlewomen,  skilled  hostesses 
and  nurses.  She  had  a  business  to  learn 
under  the  old  regime,  and  there  was  an 
authority,  often  severely  enforced  no 
doubt,  which  made  her  learn  it  well. 
There  was  the  same  appraising  of  the 
169 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

efficiency  of  the  girl  for  her  business  there 
was  of  the  boy  for  his. 
I  The  girl  of  to-day  rarely  has  any  such 
systematic  training  for  the  material  side 
of  her  business,  nor  is  a  dignified  place 
provided  for  her  in  well-to-do  families. 
Her  place  is  parasitical  and  demoraliz- 
ing. Take  the  young  girl  who  has  been 
what  we  call  "educated";  that  is,  one 
who  has  gone  through  college  and  has 
not  found  a  talent  which  she  is  eager  to 
develop.  The  spirit  of  the  times  makes 
her  less  keen  for  marriage,  puts  no  feeling 
of  obligation  of  marriage  upon  her.  She 
finds  herself  in  a  home  which  is  not 
regarded  as  a  serious  industrial  under- 
taking. Things  go  on  more  or  less  ac- 
cidentally, according  to  traditions  or 
conventions.  Her  ideas  of  scientific  man- 
agement, if  she  has  any,  are  treated  as 
revolutionary.  Her  help  is  not  needed. 
There  is  no  place  for  her. 
170 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

The  daughters  of  the  very  poor  often 
have  better  fortune  than  she  in  this 
respect.  They,  from  very  early  years, 
have  known  that  they  were  necessary 
to  the  family.  Almost  invariably  they 
accept  heavy  and  sometimes  cruel  bur- 
dens cheerfully,  even  proudly.  It  is  the 
pride  of  knowing  themselves  important 
to  those  whom  they  love.  One  of  the 
difficult  things  to  combat  in  enforcing 
the  laws  which  forbid  children  under 
fourteen  working,  is  the  child's  desire  to 
help.  He  may  hate  the  hardship,  but 
at  least  there  is  in  his  lot  none  of  that 
hopeless  sense  of  futility  which  comes 
over  the  girl  of  high  spirit  when  she  real- 
izes she  has  no  practical  value  in  the 
group  to  which  she  belongs.  "Not 
needed"  —  that  is  one  of  the  tragic  ex- 
periences of  the  young  girl  in  the  well- 
to-do  family.  To  save  herself,  to  meet 
the  truth  of  her  day  which  has  taken  hold 
171 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

of  her,  she  must  seek  a  productive  place; 
that  is,  leave  home,  seek  work.  If  she 
has  some  special  talent,  knows  what  she 
wants  to  do,  she  is  fortunate  indeed. 
With  the  majority  it  is  work,  something 
to  do,  a  place  where  they  can  be  inde- 
pendently productive,  that  is  sought. 

The  girl  of  the  family  in  moderate 
circumstances  is  no  better  off.  She  must 
contribute  in  some  way,  and  there  is  no 
scientific  management  in  her  home  — 
no  study  of  ways  and  means  which  enables 
her  to  contribute  and  remain  at  home. 
She  is  driven  outside  in  order  to  support 
herself.  I  cannot  but  believe  that  here 
is  one  of  the  gravest  weaknesses  in  our 
educational  machinery,  this  failure  to 
give  the  girl  inclined  to  remain  at  home 
a  training  which  would  enable  her  to 
help  make  more  of  a  limited  income. 
Nothing  is  so  rare  to-day  as  the  fine  habit 
of  making  much  of  little.  A  dollar 
172 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

mixed  with  brains  is  worth  five  in  every 
place  where  dollars  are  used.  Particu- 
larly is  this  true  in  the  household.  The 
failure  to  teach  how  to  mix  brains  and 
dollars,  and  to  inspire  respect  for  the 
undertaking,  annually  drives  thousands 
of  girls  into  our  already  overburdened 
industrial  system  who  would  be  healthier 
and  happier  at  home  and  who  would 
render  there  a  much  greater  economic 
service.  Such  work  as  is  being  done  in 
certain  Western  agricultural  colleges  for 
girls,  in  the  Carnegie  School  for  Women 
in  Pittsburg,  in  Miss  Kittridge's  House- 
hold Centers  in  New  York  City,  is  a 
recognition  of  this  need  of  making  scien- 
tific managers  —  trained  household  work- 
ers— of  young  women.  There  is  no  more 
practical  way  of  relieving  the  industrial 
strain. 

It  is  not  always  the  dependent  and  so 
humiliating  position  a  girl  finds  herself 
173 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

in  that  drives  her  from  home.  It  is  fre- 
quently the  discovery  that  she  is  a  mem- 
ber of  a  group  that  has  no  responsible 
place  in  the  community ;  that  regards  it- 
self as  a  purely  isolated,  unrelated,  irre- 
sponsible unit,  —  an  atom  without  affini- 
ties !  The  home  can  be,  if  it  will,  the 
most  antisocial  force  in  existence,  for  it 
can,  if  it  will,  exist  practically  for  itself. 
That  excessive  individualism,  which  is 
responsible  for  so  many  evils  in  our 
country,  has  encouraged  this  isolation. 
The  girl  who  finds  herself  without  a 
productive  place  at  home  at  the  same 
time  finds  none  of  the  fine  inspiration 
which  comes  from  fitting  herself  into  a 
social  scheme  and  helping  to  do  its  work. 
The  spirit  of  the  age  is  social.  She  feels 
its  call,  she  sees  how  unresponsive,  even 
antipathetic,  to  it  her  home  is.  She  con- 
cludes that  if  she  is  to  serve  she  must 
seek  something  to  do  in  some  remote 
174 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

city.  The  attraction  the  Social  Settle- 
ment has  for  the  girl  finds  its  base  here. 
The  loss  to  communities  of  their  edu- 
cated young  women,  who  find  no  re- 
sponse to  their  need,  no  place  to  serve  in 
their  own  society,  is  incalculable. 

It  is  not  infrequent  that  a  girl  who  may 
have  by  some  chance  of  fortune  a  suffi- 
cient sense  of  independence  in  her  home, 
who  knows  herself  needed  there,  and  is 
ready  to  perform  the  service,  is  driven  out 
by  the  persistence  of  that  spirit  of  pa- 
rental authority,  which  looks  upon  it  as 
a  duty  to  rule  the  life,  particularly  of  the 
daughter,  as  long  as  she  is  at  home. 
There  is  nothing  clearer  than  that  the 
old  domination  of  one  person  by  another 
is  a  thing  of  the  past.  A  new  spirit  of 
cooperation  and  friendly  direction  has 
come  into  the  world.  The  home  which 
it  does  not  pervade  cannot  keep  its 
young. 

175 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

The  most  essential  thing  for  a  woman 
to  understand  is  that  her  business  is  not 
to  order  her  daughter's  life,  but  to  assist 
that  daughter  to  shape  it  herself.  She 
should  be  prepared  to  say  to  her:  "The 
most  interesting  and  important  thing  in 
the  world  for  you  is  to  work  out  your 
own  particular  life.  You  must  build  it 
from  the  place  where  you  stand  and  with 
the  materials  in  your  hands.  Nobody 
else  ever  stood  in  your  particular  place 
or  ever  will  stand  in  one  identical;  no- 
body ever  has  or  can  possess  the  same 
materials.  You  alone  can  fuse  the  ele- 
ments. Hold  your  place;  do  not  try 
to  shift  into  the  place  that  another  occu- 
pies. Keep  your  eye  on  what  you  have 
to  work  with,  not  on  what  somebody 
else  has.  The  ultimate  result,  the  origi- 
nality, flavor,  distinction,  usefulness  of 
your  life,  depend  on  the  care,  the  rever- 
ence, and  the  intelligence  with  which 
176 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

you  work  up  and  out  from  where  you  are 
and  with  what  you  have." 

It  is  only  the  woman  who  is  prepared 
to  say  something  like  that  to  her  daugh- 
ter, to  help  her  to  see  it,  and  to  rise  to  it 
that  has  brought  into  her  home  the  spirit 
of  to-day. 

Where  there  is  failure  at  any  one  of 
these  points,  and  if  one  fails,  all  probably 
will,  since  they  are  obvious  elements  in 
the  liberal  view  of  life,  the  girl  must  go 
forth  if  her  life  is  to  go  progressively  on. 
She  must  seek  work,  less  for  the  sake  of 
work  than  for  the  sake  of  life.  To  re- 
main where  she  is,  unproductive  in  a  group 
which  does  not  recognize  the  calls  of  the 
present  world  and  where  another  person 
—  for  the  mother  who  tries  to  force  the 
individuality  becomes  another  person  — 
insists  on  shaping  her  course,  —  to  do 
this  is  to  quench  the  spirit,  stop  the  very 
breath  of  life. 

X  177 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

The  girl  goes  forth  to  seek  work.  She 
has  almost  invariably  the  idea  that  work 
outside  the  home  has  less  of  drudgery 
in  it,  i.e.  less  routine  and  meanness,  more 
excitement.  She  is  unprepared  for  the 
years  of  steady  grinding  labor  which  she 
must  go  through  to  earn  her  bread  in 
any  trade  or  profession.  She  learns  that 
work  is  work  whether  done  in  kitchen, 
sewing  room,  countinghouse,  studio,  or 
editor's  sanctum,  and  all  that  keeps 
the  operations  which  consume  the  bulk 
of  the  worker's  time  in  any  of  these 
places  from  being  drudgery  is  that  he 
keeps  before  him  the  end  for  which  they 
are  performed.  The  first  disillusionment 
comes,  then,  when  she  faces  the  necessity 
of  a  long  steady  pull  for  years  if  she  is 
to  "arrive." 

A  second  comes  when  she  finds  she 
must  prove  to  a  busy,  driven  world  that 
she  is  worth  its  attention;  she  must  do 
178 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

more  than  simply  knock  for  admission 
and  declare  her  fealty  to  its  ideals.  She 
realizes  sooner  or  later  that  she  is  an 
outsider  and  must  delve  her  way  in.  No 
sapper  works  harder  to  make  his  trench 
than  most  young  women  do  to  make 
stable  places  for  themselves  in  strange 
communities. 

The  gnawing  loneliness  of  the  girl  who 
has  left  home  to  make  her  way  is  one  of 
the  most  fruitful  causes  of  the  question- 
able relations  which  well-born  girls  form 
more  often  than  society  realizes.  The 
girl  seizes  eagerly  every  chance  for  com- 
panionship or  pleasure.  Her  keen  need 
of  it  makes  her  overappreciative  and 
undercritical.  Moreover,  she  has  the 
confidence  of  ignorance.  Most  American 
girls  are  brought  up  as  if  wrongdoing 
were  impossible  to  them.  Nobody  has 
ever  suggested  to  them  that  they  have 
the  possibility  of  all  crimes  in  their  make- 
179 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

up !  Parents  and  teachers  ordinarily 
have  extraordinary  skill  in  evading,  but 
little  in  facing,  the  facts  of  life. 

Disarmed  by  her  ignorance,  the  girl 
goes  out  to  a  freedom  such  as  no  country 
has  ever  before  believed  it  safe  to  allow 
the  young,  either  girl  or  boy.  This  free- 
dom is  of  course  the  logical  result  of  what 
we  call  the  "emancipation  of  women." 
It  is  the  swinging  of  the  pendulum  from 
the  old  system  of  chaperonage  and  author- 
ity. The  weak  point  is  in  the  fact  that 
the  girl  has  not  knowledge  enough  for 
her  freedom.  It  is  not  a  return  of  the 
old  system  of  guarded  girls  which  is 
needed.  That  is  impossible  under  mod- 
em conditions,  out  of  harmony  with 
modern  ideas.  The  great  need  is  that 
the  women  of  the  country  realize  that 
freedom  unaccompanied  by  knowledge  is 
one  of  the  most  dangerous  tools  that  can 
be  put  into  a  human  being's  hands. 
180 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

The  reluctance  of  women  to  face  this 
fact  is  the  most  discouraging  side  of  the 
woman  question. 

The  girl  who  goes  forth  should  go  armed 
with  knowledge.  Moreover,  in  moments 
of  loneliness,  when  she  is  ready  to  slip, 
she  should  be  literally  jerked  back  by  the 
pull  of  the  home.  This  hold  of  the  home 
is  no  chimerical  thing.  It  is  a  positive, 
living  reality.  The  home  has  a  power  of 
projecting  itself  into  the  lives  of  those 
who  go  out  from  it.  It  is  where  the  girl 
does  not  carry  away  a  sense  of  an  unin- 
terrupted relation  —  a  certainty  that  she 
is  a  part  of  that  group  and  that  achieve- 
ment, that  she  is  only  carrying  on,  enlarg- 
ing, helping  to  extend,  beautify,  and  ripen 
its  work,  that  she  is  not  homeless.  Noth- 
ing can  so  hold  her  in  her  isolation  as  that 
sense. 

The  Uneasy  Woman  of  to-day  who  has 
fulfilled  to  the  letter,  as  she  understands 
181 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

it,  the  Woman's  Business,  is  frequently- 
heard  to  say:  "My  boys  are  in  college; 
they  do  not  need  me.  My  girls  are  mar- 
ried or  at  work,  and  they  do  not  need  me. 
I  have  nothing  to  do.  My  business  is 
complete.  I  am  retired,  sidetracked. 
It  is  for  this  reason  that  I  ask  a  part  in 
politics."  But  her  argument  proves  that 
she  does  not  understand  her  business. 
She  may  want  and  need  some  outside 
occupation  for  the  very  health  of  her 
business,  politics  perhaps,  but  certainly 
not  because  her  business  is  done. 

There  is  no  more  critical  time  for  her 
than  when  her  young  people  go  out  to 
try  themselves  in  the  world.  The  girl 
particularly  needs  this  pull  of  the  home, 
not  only  to  keep  her  on  a  straight  path, 
but  to  keep  her  from  the  narrowness  and 
selfishness  which  overtake  so  many  self- 
supporting  women  who  have  no  close 
family  responsibilities.  The  fetich  which 
182 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

has  been  made,  for  many  years  now,  of 
work  for  women,  that  is,  of  work  outside 
of  the  home,  frequently  leads  the  woman 
to  take  some  particular  virtue  to  herself 
for  self-support.  She  feels  that  it  en- 
titles her  to  special  consideration,  re- 
leases her  from  obligations  which  she 
does  not  voluntarily  assume.  The  atti- 
tude is  enough  to  narrow  and  harden 
her  life.  The  great  preventive  of  this 
disaster  is  a  responsible  home  relation. 
If  she  must  share  her  earnings,  it  is  a 
blessed  thing  for  her.  If  not,  she  should 
share  its  burdens  and  its  hopes,  in  order 
to  have  a  continued  source  of  outside 
interest  to  broaden  and  soften  her,  to 
keep  her  out  of  the  ranks  of  the  charm- 
less, self-centered,  single  women,  whose 
only  occupations  are  self-support  and 
self -care. 

The  problems  involved  in  keeping  the 
girl  who  has  a  home  from  being  homeless 
183 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

are  not  simple.  They  are  as  intricate 
as  anything  a  woman  can  face.  They 
call  for  the  highest  understanding,  re- 
sponsiveness, and  activity.  No  futile  de- 
vices will  meet  them.  "My  daughter  is 
not  coming  home  to  be  idle,"  I  heard  a 
fine-intentioned  woman  say  recently.  "I 
insist  that  she  take  all  the  care  of  her 
room,  save  the  weekly  cleaning,  and  that 
she  keep  the  living-room  tidy."  But 
what  an  occupation  for  a  young  woman 
with  a  college  degree,  who  for  four  years 
has  led  a  busy,  well-organized  life  in 
which  each  task  was  directed  toward 
some  definite  purpose !  What  a  com- 
mentary on  the  mother's  understanding 
of  "economic  independence,"  a  matter 
of  which  she  talks  eloquently  at  her  club  ! 
All  that  it  proved  was  that  the  woman 
had  never  realized  the  girl's  case,  had 
never  given  consecutive,  serious  thought 
to  its  handling. 

184 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

How  little  chance  there  will  probably 
be  for  this  same  girl  to  do  at  home  any 
serious  work  in  case  she  develops  a  talent 
for  it.  The  home  of  the  prosperous, 
energetic  American  woman  is  pervaded 
by  a  spirit  of  eager  and  generally  happy 
excitement.  Good  works  and  gay  pleas- 
ures fill  its  days  in  a  wild  jumble.  There 
is  little  or  no  order,  selection,  or  discre- 
tion discernible  in  the  result.  "Some- 
thing doing"  all  the  time  seems  to  be  the 
motto,  and  to  take  part  in  this  headless 
procession  of  unrelated  events  becomes 
the  first  law  of  the  household.  The 
daughter  has  been  living  an  organized 
life  in  college.  She  wants  to  study  or 
write,  or  do  regular  work  of  some  kind. 
But  there  is  no  order  in  the  spirit  of  the 
place,  no  respect  for  order,  no  respect  for 
a  regular  occupation.  "I  cannot  work 
at  home"  —  one  hears  the  cry  often 
enough.  It  is  not  always  because  of 
185 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

this  atmosphere  of  helter-skelter  activity. 
It  is  often  because  of  something  worse,  — 
an  atmosphere  of  slothful,  pleasure-loving 
indifference  to  activities  of  all  kinds,  or 
one  of  tacit  or  expressed  discontent  with 
the  burdens  and  the  limitations  which 
are  an  inescapable  part  of  the  Business 
of  Being  a  Woman. 

The  problems  connected  with  a  girl's 
desire  to  be  of  social  service  are  even  more 
difficult.  There  is  a  curious  blindness  or 
indifference  in  our  town  and  country- 
districts  to  social  needs.  There  is  still 
alive  the  notion  that  sending  flowers  and 
jellies  to  the  hospital,  distributing  old 
clothes  wisely,  and  packing  generous 
Christmas  baskets  meet  all  obligations. 
Social  service  —  of  which  one  may,  and 
generally  does,  hear  a  great  deal  in  the 
women's  clubs  —  is  vaguely  supposed  to 
be  something  which  has  to  do  with  great 
cities  and  factory  towns,  not  with  the 
186 


THE  HOMELESS   DAUGHTER 

small  community.  Yet  one  reason  that 
social  problems  are  so  acute  in  great 
groups  of  men  and  women  is  that  they 
are  so  poorly  met  in  small  and  scattered 
groups.  There  is  the  same  need  of  in- 
dustrial training,  of  efficient  schools,  of 
books,  of  neighborliness,  of  innocent 
amusements,  of  finding  opportunities  for 
the  exceptional  child,  of  looking  after 
the  adenoids  and  teeth,  of  segregating 
the  tubercular,  of  doing  all  the  scores  of 
social  services  in  the  small  town  as  in  the 
great.  Work  is  really  more  hopeful  there 
because  there  is  some  possibility  of  know- 
ing approximately  all  the  cases,  which 
is  never  possible  in  the  city.  And  yet 
how  far  from  general  it  is  to  find  anything 
like  organized  efforts  at  real  social  serv- 
ice in  the  small  community.  If  a  girl 
serves  in  such  a  community,  it  is  because 
she  has  the  parts  of  a  pioneer  —  and  few 
have. 

187 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

It  is  not  the  girl  who,  having  a  home, 
yet  is  homeless,  who  is  responsible  for  her 
situation.  Her  necessity  is  to  see  herself 
acting  as  a  responsible  and  useful  factor 
in  an  intelligent  plan.  If  the  family 
does  not  present  itself  to  her  as  a  grave, 
dignified  undertaking  on  which  several 
persons  dear  to  her  have  embarked,  how 
can  she  be  expected  to  tie  to  it.^*  The 
old  phrases  which  she  may  hear  now  and 
then  —  "the  honor  of  the  family"  — 
"duty  to  parents"  —  only  savor  of  cant 
to  her.  They  have  no  pricking  vitality 
in  them.  She  gets  no  acute  reaction 
from  them.  She  sees  herself  merely  as 
an  accident  in  an  accidental  group,  headed 
nowhere  in  particular. 

What  it  all  amounts  to  is  that  the 
greatest  art  in  the  Woman's  Business  is 
using  youth.  It  is  no  easy  matter. 
Youth  is  a  terrible  force,  confident,  self- 
ish, unknowing.  Rarely  has  it  real  cour- 
188 


THE  HOMELESS  DAUGHTER 

age,  real  interest  in  aught  but  itself.  It 
has  all  to  learn,  but  it  is  youth,  the  most 
beautiful  and  hopeful  thing  in  life.  And 
it  is  the  thing  upon  which  the  full  devel- 
opment of  life  for  a  woman  depends. 
She  must  have  it  always  at  her  side,  if 
she  is  to  know  her  own  full  meaning  in 
the  scheme  of  things.  It  is  part  of  her 
tragedy  that  she  fails  so  often  to  under- 
stand how  essential  is  youth  to  her  as  an 
individual,  her  happiness  and  her  growth. 
The  fact  that  a  woman  is  childless  is 
no  reason  in  the  present  world  why  she 
should  be  cut  off  from  the  developing 
and  ennobling  association.  Indeed,  the 
childless  woman  of  to-day,  in  addition 
to  her  obligation  to  herself,  has  a  peculiar 
obligation  to  society  in  the  matter  of  the 
friendless  child. 


180 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN  AND  THE  FRIEND- 
LESS   CHILD 

One  of  the  first  conclusions  forced  on 
a  thoughtful  unprejudiced  observer  of 
society  is  that  the  major  percentage  of  its 
pains  and  its  vices  result  from  a  failure 
to  make  good  connections.  Children  pine 
and  even  die  for  fruit  in  the  cities,  while  a 
hundred  miles  away  thousands  of  barrels 
of  apples  are  rotting  on  the  ground. 
Famine  devastates  one  country,  while 
the  granaries  of  another  are  bursting  with 
food.  Men  and  women  drink  themselves 
into  the  gutter  from  sheer  loneliness, 
while  other  men  and  women  shrivel  up  in 
isolated  comfort.  One  of  the  most  pitiful 
examples  of  this  failure  to  connect  is  that 
190 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

of  the  childless  woman  and  the  friendless, 
uncared-for  child. 

There  never  at  any  time  in  any  country 
in  the  world's  history  existed  so  large  a 
group  of  women  with  whom  responsibility 
and  ejffort  were  a  matter  of  choice,  as 
exists  to-day  in  the  United  Statec.  While 
a  large  number  of  these  free  women  are 
devoting  themselves  whole-heartedly  to 
public  service  of  the  most  intelligent  and 
ingenious  kind,  the  great  majority  recog- 
nize no  obligation  to  make  any  substan- 
tial return  to  society  for  its  benefits.  A 
small  percentage  of  these  are  self-sup- 
porting, but  the  majority  are  purely  par- 
asitical. Indeed,  the  heaviest  burden 
to-day  on  productive  America,  aside 
from  the  burden  imposed  by  a  vicious 
industrial  system,  is  that  of  its  nonpro- 
ductive women.  They  are  the  most 
demanding  portion  of  our  society.  They 
spend  more  money  than  any  other  group, 
191 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

are  more  insistent  in  their  cry  for  amuse- 
ment, are  more  resentful  of  interruptions 
of  their  pleasures  and  excitements ;  they 
go  to  greater  extremes  of  indolence  and 
of  uneasiness. 

The  really  serious  side  to  the  existence 
of  this  parasitical  group  is  that  great 
numbers  of  other  women,  not  free,  forced 
to  produce,  accept  their  standards  of  life. 
We  hear  women,  useful  women,  every- 
where talking  about  the  desirability  of 
not  being  obliged  to  do  anything,  com- 
miserating women  who  must  work, 
commiserating  those  who  have  heavy 
household  responsibilities,  and  by  the 
whole  gist  of  their  words  and  acts  in- 
fluencing those  younger  and  less  experi- 
enced than  themselves  to  believe  that 
happiness  lies  in  irresponsible  living. 

Various  gradations  of  the  theory  of 
which  this  is  the  extreme  expression 
show  themselves.  Thus  there  are  great 
19£ 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

numbers  of  women  of  moderate  means, 
who  by  a  little  daily  effort  can  keep  com- 
fortable and  attractive  homes  for  them- 
selves and  their  husbands,  and  yet  who 
are  utterly  regardless  of  outside  respon- 
sibilities, who  are  practically  isolated  in 
the  community.  They  pass  their  lives 
in  a  little  round  of  household  activities, 
sunning  and  preening  themselves  in  their 
long  hours  of  leisure  like  so  many  sleek 
cats. 

There  is  still  another  division  of  this 
irresponsible  class,  who  build  up  frenzied 
existences  for  themselves  in  all  sorts  of 
outside  activities.  They  plunge  head- 
long into  each  new  proposition  for  pleas- 
ure or  social  service  only  to  desert  it  as 
something  more  novel  and  exciting  and, 
for  the  instant,  popular,  appears.  Steady, 
intelligent  standing  by  an  undertaking 
through  its  ups  and  downs,  its  dull  sea- 
sons and  its  unpopular  phases,  they  are 
o  193 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

incapable  of.  Their  efforts  have  no  rela- 
tion to  an  intelligently  conceived  purpose. 
With  them  may  be  grouped  those  women 
who,  by  their  canonization  of  the  unimpor- 
tant, construct  heavily  burdened  but  ut- 
terly fruitless  lives.  They  laboriously  pad 
out  their  days  with  trivial  things,  vanities, 
shams,  and  shadows,  to  which  they  give 
the  serious  undivided  attention  which 
should  be  bestowed  only  on  real  enter- 
prises. 

There  are  others  who  seek  soporifics, 
release  from  a  hearty  tackling  of  their 
individual  situations,  in  absorbing  work, 
a  work  which  perhaps  fills  their  minds, 
but  which  is  mere  occupation  —  some- 
thing to  make  them  forget  —  not  an  art 
for  art's  sake,  not  labor  for  its  useful 
fruits,  but  a  protective,  separating  shield 
to  shut  out  the  insistent  demands  of  life 
in  the  place  where  they  find  themselves. 

All  of  these  women  are  rightfully 
194 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

classed  as  irresponsible,  whether  they  are 
moved  by  vanity,  indolence,  purposeless- 
ness,  social  blindness,  or,  most  pitiful,  a 
sense  of  the  emptiness  of  life  unattended 
by  the  imagination  which  reveals  the 
sources  from  which  life  is  filled.  No  one 
of  them  is  building  a  "House  of  Life" 
for  herself.  They  are  building  gimcrack 
palaces,  gingerbread  cottages,  structures 
which  the  first  full  blast  of  life  will  level 
to  the  ground. 

These  women  are  not  peculiar  to  city 
or  to  country.  They  are  scattered  na- 
tion-wide. You  find  them  on  farms  and 
in  mansions,  in  offices  and  in  academic 
halls.  In  startling  contrast  there  exists 
almost  under  the  very  eaves  of  the  roofs 
which  shelter  them  a  vast  and  pitiful 
group  of  friendless  children,  —  the  de- 
serted babe,  the  "little  mother,"  the 
boys  and  girls  running  wild  on  side  streets 
in  every  village  in  our  land  and  in  every 
195 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

slum  in  the  cities,  the  factory  child,  the 
shop  girl  who  has  no  home.  Let  us  re- 
member that  a  goodly  percentage  of 
those  at  work  have  homes  and  that  they 
are  engaged  in  a  stimulating,  if  hard,  effort 
to  "help,"  that  they  have  the  steady- 
ing consciousness  that  they  are  needed. 
Nevertheless,  this  mass  of  youth  is  on 
the  whole  in  an  unnatural  position  —  an 
antisocial  relation. 

Society  can  never  run  rightfully  until 
all  its  members  are  performing  their 
natural  functions.  No  woman,  whatever 
her  condition,  can  escape  her  obligation  to 
youth  without  youth  suffering,  and  with- 
out suffering  herself.  One  of  the  crying 
needs  of  to-day  is  a  crusade,  a  jar,  which 
will  force  upon  our  free  women  the 
friendless  children  of  the  country,  give 
them  some  sense  of  the  undeniable  rela- 
tion they  bear  to  them,  show  them  that 
they  are  in  a  sense  the  cause  of  this 
196 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

pathetic  group  and  that  it  is  their  work 
to  relieve  it. 

True,  for  a  woman  there  is  nothing 
more  painful  than  putting  herself  face  to 
face  with  the  suffering  of  children.  Yet 
for  many  years  now  we  have  had  in  this 
country  a  large  and  increasing  number 
who  were  going  through  the  daily  pain 
of  grappling  with  every  phase  of  the  dis- 
tressing problems  which  come  from  the 
poverty,  friendlessness,  and  overwork  of 
the  young.  Out  of  their  heartbreaking 
scrutinies  there  have  come  certain  de- 
terminations which  are  being  adopted 
rapidly  wherever  the  social  sense  is 
aroused.  We  may  roughly  sum  up  these 
conclusions  or  determinations  to  be 
these :  — 

It  is  not  necessary  or  endurable  that 

children  grow  up  starved  and  overworked, 

that  boys  and  girls  be  submitted  to  vicious 

surroundings,  that  talent  be  crushed,  that 

197 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

young  men  and  young  women  be  devoured 
by  crime  and  greed.  Youth,  its  nurturing 
and  developing,  has  become  the  passion 
of  the  day.  This  is  the  meaning  of  our 
bureaus  of  Child  Labor,  of  our  Children's 
Courts,  our  Houses  of  Correction,  our 
Fresh-Air  Funds  and  Vacation  Homes, 
our  laws  regulating  hours  and  conditions, 
our  Social  Settlements. 

At  its  very  best,  however,  legislation, 
organization,  work  in  groups,  only  in- 
directly reach  the  base  of  the  trouble. 
These  homeless  babes  and  children,  these 
neglected  boys  and  girls,  these  reckless 
shop  and  factory  girls,  are  generally  the 
pain  and  menace  that  they  are  because 
they  have  not  had,  as  individuals,  that 
guidance  and  affection  of  women  to  which 
each  has  a  natural  right.  No  collective 
work,  however  good  it  may  be,  can  pro- 
tect or  guide  these  children  properly. 
Rightfully  they  should  be  the  charge  of 
198 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

that  body  of  women  who  are  unham- 
pered, "free."  These  women  have  more, 
or  less,  intelHgence,  time,  and  means. 
They  owe  society  a  return  for  their  free- 
dom, their  means,  and  their  education. 
Nature  has  made  them  the  guardians  of 
childhood.  Can  they  decently  shirk  the 
obligation  any  more  than  a  man  can  de- 
cently shirk  his  duty  as  a  citizen  ?  In- 
deed, the  case  of  the  woman  unresponsive 
to  her  duty  toward  youth  is  parallel  to 
that  of  the  man  unresponsive  to  his  duty 
toward  public  affairs.  One  is  as  profit- 
less and  parasitical  as  the  other. 

The  man  who  has  no  notion  of  what  is 
doing  politically  in  his  own  ward,  who 
does  not  sense  the  malign  influences  which 
may  be  working  in  his  neighborhood,  in 
his  very  street,  perhaps  in  the  next  house, 
who  has  not  his  eye  on  the  unscrupulous 
small  politician  who  leads  the  ward  by  the 
nose,  who  knows  nothing  of  the  records 
199 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

of  the  local  candidates,  never  goes  to  the 
primaries,  —  this  man  is  one  of  the  most 
dangerous  citizens  we  have.  It  is  he 
who  makes  the  machine  possible.  If  he 
did  his  work,  the  governmental  machine, 
which  starts  there  with  him,  would  be 
sound.  It  would  be  begun  by  honest 
men  interested  in  serving  the  country  to 
the  best  of  their  ability,  and  on  such  a 
foundation  no  future  solidarity  of  cor- 
ruption would  be  possible. 

The  individual  woman's  obligation  to- 
ward the  children  and  young  people  in 
her  neighborhood  is  very  like  this  obliga- 
tion of  the  man  to  public  affairs.  It  is 
for  her  to  know  the  conditions  under 
which  the  children,  the  boys  and  girls, 
young  men  and  maids,  in  her  vicinity  are 
actually  living.  It  is  for  her  to  be  alert 
to  their  health,  amusements,  and  general 
education.  It  is  for  her  to  find  the  one 
—  and  there  always  is  one  —  that  actually 
200 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

needs  her.  It  is  for  her  to  correlate  her 
personal  discoveries  and  experiences  with 
the  general  efforts  of  the  community. 

This  is  no  work  for  an  occasional  morn- 
ing. It  does  not  mean  sporadic  or  even 
regular  "neighborhood  visiting."  It 
means  observation,  reflection,  and  study. 
It  has  nothing  to  do  save  indirectly  with 
societies,  or  groups,  or  laws.  It  is  a  per- 
sonal work,  something  nobody  else  can 
do,  and  something  which,  if  it  is  neglected, 
adds  just  so  much  more  to  the  stream 
of  uncared-for  youth.  How  is  it  to  be 
done  ?  Have  you  ever  watched  a  woman 
interested  in  birds  making  her  obser- 
vations ?  She  will  get  up  at  daylight  to 
catch  a  note  of  a  new  singer.  She  will 
study  in  detail  the  little  family  that  is 
making  its  home  on  her  veranda.  From 
the  hour  that  the  birds  arrive  in  the 
spring  until  the  hour  that  they  leave  in 
the  fall  she  misses  nothing  of  their  doings. 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

It  is  a  beautiful  and  profitable  study,  and 
it  is  a  type  of  what  is  required  of  a  woman 
who  would  fulfill  her  obligation  toward 
the  youth  of  her  neighborhood. 

Could  we  have  such  study  everywhere 
in  country  and  town,  what  tragedies  and 
shames  we  might  be  spared !  A  few 
months  ago  the  whole  nation  was  horrified 
by  a  riot  in  a  prosperous  small  city  of  the 
Middle  West  which  ended  in  the  lynching 
of  a  young  man,  a  mere  boy,  who  in  try- 
ing to  discharge  his  duty  as  a  public 
official  had  killed  a  man.  Some  thirty 
persons,  over  half  of  them  hoys  under 
twenty  years  of  age,  are  to-day  serving 
terms  of  from  fifteen  to  twenty  years  in 
the  penitentiary  for  their  part  in  this 
lynching. 

Their  terrible  work  was  no  insane  out- 
break. Analyzed,  it  was  a  logical  con- 
sequence of  the  social  and  political  con- 
ditions under  which  the  boys  had  been 
202 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

brought  up.  In  a  pretty,  rich,  busy 
town  of  30,000  people  proud  of  its 
churches  and  its  schools,  eighty  saloons 
industriously  plied  their  business  —  and 
part  of  their  business,  as  it  always  is,  was 
to  train  youths  to  become  their  patrons. 

What  were  the  women  doing  in  the 
town  ?  I  asked  the  question  of  one  who 
knew  it.  "Why,"  he  said,  "they  were 
doing  just  what  women  do  everywhere, 
no  better,  no  worse.  They  had  their 
clubs ;  I  suppose  a  dozen  literary  clubs, 
several  sewing  clubs,  several  bridge  clubs, 
and  a  number  of  dancing  clubs.  I  think 
they  cared  a  little  more  for  bridge  than 
for  literature,  many  of  them  at  least. 
They  took  little  part  in  civic  work,  though 
they  had  done  much  for  the  city  library 
and  city  hospital.  Many  girls  went  to  col- 
lege, to  the  State  Institute,  to  Vassar  and 
Smith.  They  came  back  to  teach  and  to 
marry.  It  was  just  as  it  is  everywhere." 
303 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Another  to  whom  I  put  the  same  ques- 
tion, answered  me  in  a  sympathetic  let- 
ter full  of  understanding  comment.  The 
mingled  devotion,  energy,  and  blindness 
of  the  women  the  letter  described,  spoke 
in  its  every  line.  They  built  charming 
homes,  reared  healthy,  active  children 
whom  they  educated  at  any  personal 
sacrifice  —  all  within  a  circle  of  eighty 
saloons  !  To  offset  the  saloons  they  built 
churches  —  a  church  for  each  sect  — 
each  more  gorgeous  than  its  neighbor. 
It  was  in  building  churches  that  they 
showed  the  "greatest  tenacity  of  pur- 
pose." They  had  a  large  temperance 
organization.  It  supported  a  rest  room 
and  met  fortnightly  to  pray  "ardently 
and  sincerely."  How  little  this  body  of 
good  women  sensed  their  problem,  how 
little  they  were  fitted  to  deal  with  it, 
my  informant's  comment  reveals.  "You 
doubtless  remember  the  story,"  the  let- 
204 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

ter  runs,  "of  the  old  lady  who  deplored 
the  shooting  of  craps  because,  though 
she  didn't  know  what  they  were,  *life 
was  probably  as  dear  to  them  as  to  any- 
body.'" 

"It  was  just  as  it  is  everywhere.'* 
Busy  with  self  and  their  immediate 
circles,  they  went  their  daily  ways  un- 
seeing, though  these  ways  were  hedged 
with  a  corruption  whose  rank  and  hor- 
rible offshoots  at  every  step  clutched  the 
feet  of  the  children  for  whom  they  were 
responsible. 

Perhaps  there  is  nothing  to-day  needed 
in  this  country  more  than  driving  into 
the  minds  of  women  this  personal  obliga- 
tion to  do  what  may  be  called  intensive 
gardening  in  youth.  Whether  a  woman 
wishes  to  see  it  or  not,  she  is  the  center 
of  a  whirl  of  life.  The  health,  the  happi- 
ness, and  the  future  of  those  that  are  in 
this  whirl  are  affected  vitally  by  what 
£05 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

she  is  and  does.  To  know  all  of  the  ele- 
ments which  are  circulating  about  her 
as  a  man  knows,  if  he  does  his  work,  the 
political  and  business  elements  in  his 
own  group,  this  is  her  essential  task. 
That  she  should  adjust  her  discoveries  to 
the  organizations,  political,  educational, 
and  religious,  which  are  about  her,  goes 
without  saying,  but  these  organizations 
are  not  the  heart  of  her  matter.  The 
heart  of  her  matter  lies  in  what  she  does 
for  those  who  come  into  immediate  con- 
tact with  her. 

Her  business  firmly  established  in  her 
immediate  group  should  grow  as  a  man's 
business  does  in  the  outer  circle  where 
he  naturally  operates.  It  will  become 
stable  or  unstable  exactly  as  trade  or 
profession  becomes  stable  or  unstable. 
Every  year  it  should  take  on  new  ele- 
ments, ramify,  turn  up  new  obligations, 
knit  itself  more  firmly  into  the  life  of  the 
206 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

community.  With  every  year  it  should 
become  necessarily  more  complicated, 
broader  in  interests,  more  demanding  on 
her  intellectual  and  spiritual  qualities. 
Each  one  of  the  original  members  of  her 
group  gathers  others  about  himself.  In 
the  nature  of  the  case  she  will  become  one 
of  the  strongest  influences  in  these  new 
groups.  As  a  member  goes  out  she  will 
project  herself  into  other  communities 
or  perhaps  other  lands,  into  all  sorts  of 
industries,  professions,  and  arts.  Her 
growth  is  absolutely  natural.  It  is,  too, 
one  of  the  most  economical  growths  the 
world  knows.  Nothing  is  lost  in  it. 
She  spreads  literally  like  the  banyan 
tree. 

Yet  in  spite  of  this  perfectly  obvious 
fact,  there  are  people  to-day  asking,  with 
all  appearance  of  sincerity,  what  a 
woman  of  fifty  or  more  can  do  !  Their 
confining  work  in  the  home,  say  these 
207 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

observers,  is  done.  A  common  sugges- 
tion is  that  they  be  utilized  in  pohtics. 
This  suggestion  has  its  comical  side.  A 
person  who  has  nothing  to  do  after  fifty 
years  of  life  in  a  business  as  many-sided 
and  demanding  as  that  of  a  woman,  can 
hardly  be  expected  to  be  worth  much  in 
a  business  as  complicated  and  uncertain 
as  politics,  and  for  which  she  has  had  no 
training.  The  notion  that  the  woman's 
business  is  ended  at  fifty  or  sixty  is 
fantastic.  It  only  ends  there  if  she  has 
been  blind  to  the  meaning  of  her  own 
experiences ;  if  she  has  never  gone  below 
the  surface  of  her  task  —  never  seen  in 
it  anything  but  physical  relations  and 
duties ;  has  sensed  none  of  its  intimate 
relations  to  the  community,  none  of  its 
obligations  toward  those  who  have  left 
her,  none  of  those  toward  the  oncoming 
generations.  If  it  ends  there,  she  has 
failed  to  realize,  too,  the  tremendous 
208 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

importance  to  all  those  who  belong  in 
her  circle  or  who  touch  it  of  what  she 
makes  of  herself,  of  her  personal  achieve- 
ment. 

A  woman  of  fifty  or  sixty  who  has  suc- 
ceeded, has  come  to  a  point  of  sound 
philosophy  and  serenity  which  is  of  the 
utmost  value  in  the  mental  and  spiritual 
development  of  the  group  to  which  she 
belongs.  Life  at  every  one  of  its  seven 
stages  has  its  peculiar  harrowing  experi- 
ences; hope  mingles  with  uncertainty 
in  youth ;  fear  and  struggle  character- 
ize early  manhood;  disillusionment,  the 
question  whether  it  is  worth  while,  fill 
the  years  from  forty  to  fifty, — but  resolute 
grappling  with  each  period  brings  one 
out  almost  inevitably  into  a  fine  serene 
certainty  which  cannot  but  have  its 
effect  on  those  who  are  younger.  Ripe 
old  age,  cheerful,  useful,  and  understand- 
ing, is  one  of  the  finest  influences  in  the 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

world.  We  hang  Rembrandt's  or  Whist- 
ler's picture  of  his  mother  on  our  walls 
that  we  may  feel  its  quieting  hand,  the 
sense  of  peace  and  achievement  which 
the  picture  carries.  We  have  no  better 
illustration  of  the  meaning  of  old  age. 

Family  and  social  groups  should  be  a 
blend  of  all  ages.  One  of  the  present 
weaknesses  of  our  society  is  that  we  herd 
each  age  together.  The  young  do  not 
have  enough  of  the  stimulating  intellec- 
tual influence  of  their  elders.  The  elders 
do  not  have  enough  of  the  vitalizing 
influence  of  the  young.  We  make  up  our 
dinner  party  according  to  age,  with  the 
result  that  we  lose  the  full,  fine  blend  of 
Hfe. 

The  notion  that  a  woman  has  no  worthy 
place  or  occupation  after  she  is  fifty  or 
sixty,  and  that  she  can  be  utilized  in 
public  affairs,  could  only  be  entertained 
by  one  who  has  no  clear  conception  of 
210 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

either  private  or  public  affairs  —  no  vision 
of  the  infinite  reaches  of  the  one  or  the 
infinite  complexities  of  the  other.  Hu- 
man society  may  be  likened  to  two  great 
circles,  one  revolving  within  the  other. 
In  the  inner  circle  rules  the  woman. 
Here  she  breeds  and  trains  the  material 
for  the  outer  circle,  which  exists  only  by 
and  for  her.  That  accident  may  throw 
her  into  this  outer  circle  is  of  course  true, 
but  it  is  not  her  natural  habitat,  nor  is 
she  fitted  by  nature  to  live  and  circulate 
freely  there.  We  underestimate,  too,  the 
kind  of  experience  which  is  essential  for 
intelligent  citizenship  in  this  outer  circle. 
To  know  what  is  wise  and  needed  there 
one  should  circulate  in  it.  The  man  at 
his  labor  in  the  street,  in  the  meeting 
places  of  men,  learns  unconsciously,  as  a 
rule,  the  code,  the  meaning,  the  need  of 
public  affairs  as  woman  learns  those  of 
private  affairs.  What  it  all  amounts  to 
211 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

is  that  the  labor  of  the  world  is  naturally 
divided  between  the  two  different  beings 
that  people  the  world.  It  is  unfair  to 
the  woman  that  she  be  asked  to  do  the 
work  of  the  outer  circle.  The  man  can 
do  that  satisfactorily  if  she  does  her  part; 
that  is,  if  she  prepares  him  the  material. 
Certainly,  he  can  never  come  into  the 
inner  circle  and  do  her  work. 

The  idea  that  there  is  a  kind  of  in- 
equality for  a  woman  in  minding  her  own 
business  and  letting  man  do  the  same, 
comes  from  our  confused  and  rather 
stupid  notion  of  the  meaning  of  equality. 
Popularly  we  have  come  to  regard  being 
alike  as  being  equal.  We  prove  equality 
by  wearing  the  same  kind  of  clothes, 
studying  the  same  books,  regardless  of 
nature  or  capacity  or  future  life.  In- 
sisting that  women  do  the  same  things 
that  men  do,  may  make  the  two  exteriorly 
more  alike  —  it  does  not  make  them  more 
212 


THE  CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

equal.  Men  and  women  are  widely  apart 
in  functions  and  in  possibilities.  They 
cannot  be  made  equal  by  exterior  devices 
like  trousers,  ballots,  the  study  of  Greek. 
The  effort  to  make  them  so  is  much  more 
likely  to  make  them  unequal.  One  only 
comes  to  his  highest  power  by  following 
unconsciously  and  joyfully  his  own  na- 
ture. We  run  the  risk  of  destroying 
the  capacity  for  equality  when  we  at- 
tempt to  make  one  human  being  like 
another  human  being. 

The  theory  that  the  class  of  free 
women  considered  here  would  be  fired  to 
unselfish  interest  in  uncared-for  youth  if 
they  were  included  in  the  electorate  of 
the  nation  is  hardly  sustainable.  The 
ballot  has  not  prevented  the  growth  of  a 
similar  class  of  men.  Something  more 
biting  than  a  new  tool  is  needed  to  arouse 
men  and  women  who  are  absorbed  in 
self  —  some  poignant  experience  which 
213 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOIHAN 

thrusts  upon  their  indolent  minds  and 
into  their  restricted  visions  the  actuaH- 
ties  of  Hfe. 

It  should  be  said,  however,  that  the 
recent  agitation  for  the  ballot  has  served 
as  such  an  experience  for  a  good  many 
women,  particularly  in  the  East.  Per- 
haps for  the  first  time  they  have  heard 
from  the  suffrage  platform  of  the  "little 
mother,"  the  factory  child,  the  girl  liv- 
ing on  $6  a  week.  They  have  done 
more  than  espouse  the  suffrage  cause  for 
the  sake  of  the  child;  they  have  gone  out 
to  find  where  they  could  serve. 

It  is  a  new  knowledge  of  that  tide  of 
life  which  breaks  at  her  very  gate  that 
the  childless  and  the  free  American 
woman  needs,  if  she  is  to  discharge  her 
obligation  to  the  uncared-for  child.  To 
force  these  facts  upon  her,  to  cry  to  her, 
"  You  are  the  woman,  —  you  cannot  es- 
cape the  guilt  of  the  woe  and  crime  which 
214 


THE   CHILDLESS  WOMAN 

must  come  from  the  neglect  of  childhood 
in  your  radius,"  —  this  is  the  business  of 
every  man  and  woman  who  has  had  the 
pain  and  the  privilege  of  seeing  something 
of  the  actual  life  of  the  people  of  this 
world. 


215 


CHAPTER  IX 

ON   THE   ENNOBLING   OF   THE   WOMAN's 
BUSINESS 

That  the  varied,  delicate,  and  difficult 
problems  which  crowd  the  attention  of 
the  woman  in  her  social  laboratory  should 
ever  be  considered  unworthy  of  first- 
class  brains  and  training  is  but  proof  of 
the  difficulty  the  human  mind  has  in 
distinguishing  values  when  in  the  throes 
of  social  change.  We  rightly  believe 
to-day  that  the  world  is  not  nearly  so 
well  run  as  it  would  be  if  we  could  — 
or  would  —  apply  unselfishly  what  we 
already  know.  Each  of  us  advocates 
his  own  pet  theory  of  betterment,  often 
to  the  exclusion  of  everybody  else's 
theory. 

216 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

One  of  the  most  disconcerting  charac- 
teristics of  advocates,  conservative  and 
radical,  is  their  conscienceless  treatment 
of  facts.  Rarely  do  they  allow  full  value 
to  that  which  qualifies  or  contradicts  their 
theories.  The  ardent  and  single-minded 
reformer  is  not  infrequently  the  worst 
sinner  in  this  respect.  To  stir  indigna- 
tion against  conditions,  he  paints  them 
without  a  background  and  with  utter 
disregard  of  proportion. 

He  wins,  but  he  loses,  by  this  method. 
He  makes  converts  of  those  of  his  own 
kind,  those  who  like  him  have  rare 
powers  for  indignation  and  sacrifice,  but 
little  capacity  or  liking  for  the  exact  truth 
or  for  self-restraint.  He  turns  from  him 
many  who  are  as  zealous  as  he  to  change 
conditions,  but  who  demand  that  they 
be  painted  as  they  are  and  that  justice 
be  rendered  both  to  those  who  have 
fought  against  them  in  the  past  and  to 
217 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

those  who  are  in  different  ways  doing  so 
to-day. 

The  movement  for  a  fuller  life  for 
American  women  has  always  suffered 
from  the  disregard  of  some  of  its  noblest 
followers,  both  for  things  as  they  are  and 
for  things  as  they  have  been.  The  per- 
sistent belitting  for  campaign  purposes 
of  the  Business  of  Being  a  Woman  I 
have  repeatedly  referred  to  in  this  little 
series  of  essays  ;  indeed,  it  has  been 
founded  on  the  proposition  that  the 
Uneasy  Woman  of  to-day  is  to  a  large 
degree  the  result  of  the  belittlement 
of  her  natural  task  and  that  her  chief 
need  is  to  dignify,  make  scientific,  pro- 
fessionalize, that  task. 

I  doubt  if  there  is  to-day  a  more  dis- 
integrating influence  at  work  —  one  more 
fatal  to  sound  social  development  —  than 
that  which  belittles  the  home  and  the 
position  of  the  woman  in  it.  As  a 
218 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

social  institution  nothing  so  far  devised 
by  man  approaches  the  home  in  its  op- 
portunity, nor  equals  it  in  its  successes. 

The  woman's  position  at  its  head  is 
hard.  The  result  of  her  pains  and 
struggles  are  rarely  what  she  hopes, 
either  for  herself  or  for  any  one  connected 
with  her,  but  this  is  true  of  all  human 
achievement.  There  is  nothing  done  that 
does  not  mean  self-denial,  routine,  dis- 
illusionment, and  half  realization.  Even 
the  superman  goes  the  same  road,  coming 
out  at  the  same  halfway-up  house  !  It 
is  the  meaning  of  the  effort,  not  the  half 
result,  that  counts. 

The  pain  and  struggle  of  an  enterprise 
are  not  what  takes  the  heart  out  of  a 
soldier ;  it  is  telling  him  his  cause  is 
mean,  his  fight  in  vain.  Show  him  a  rea- 
son, and  he  dies  exultant.  The  woman 
is  the  world's  one  permanent  soldier. 
After  all  war  ceases  she  must  go  daily 
219 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

to  her  fight  with  death.  To  tell  her  this 
giving  of  her  life  for  life  is  merely  a 
"female  function,"  not  a  human  part,  is 
to  talk  nonsense  and  sacrilege.  It  is 
the  clear  conviction  of  even  the  most 
thoughtless  girl  that  this  way  lies  meaning 
and  fulfillment  of  life,  that  gives  her  cour- 
age to  go  to  her  battle  as  a  man-in-line 
to  his,  and  like  him  she  comes  out  with  a 
new  understanding.  The  endless  details 
of  her  life,  its  routine  and  its  restraints, 
have  a  reason  now,  as  routine  and  disci- 
pline have  for  a  soldier.  She  sees  as  he 
does  that  they  are  the  only  means  of 
securing  the  victory  bought  so  dearly  — 
of  winning  others. 

From  this  high  conviction  the  great 
mass  of  women  never  have  and  never 
can  be  turned.  What  does  happen  con- 
stantly, however,  is  loss  of  joy  and  cour- 
age in  their  undertaking.  When  these  go, 
the  vision  goes.  The  woman  feels  only 
220 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

her  burdens,  not  the  big  meaning  in 
them.  She  remembers  her  daily  grind, 
not  the  possibihties  of  her  position.  She 
falls  an  easy  victim  now  to  that  under- 
estimation of  her  business  which  is  so 
popular.  If  she  is  of  gentle  nature,  she 
becomes  apologetic,  she  has  "never  done 
anything."  If  she  is  aggressive,  she  be- 
comes a  militant.  In  either  case,  she 
charges  her  dissatisfaction  to  the  nature 
of  her  business.  What  has  come  to  her 
is  a  common  human  experience,  the  dis- 
covery that  nothing  is  quite  what  you 
expected  it  to  be,  that  if  hope  is  to  be  even 
halfway  realized,  it  will  be  by  courage 
and  persistency.  It  is  not  the  woman's 
business  that  is  at  fault;  it  is  the  faulty 
handling  of  it  and  the  human  difficulty 
in  keeping  heart  when  things  grow  hard. 
What  she  needs  is  a  strengthening  of  her 
wavering  faith  in  her  natural  place  in  the 
world,  to  see  her  business  as  a  profession, 
221 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

its  problems  formulated  and  its  relations 
to  the  work  of  society,  as  a  whole,  clearly 
stated. 

Quite  as  great  an  injustice  to  her  as  the 
belittling  of  her  business  has  been  the 
practice,  also  for  campaigning  purposes, 
of  denying  her  a  part  in  the  upbuilding 
of  civilization.  There  was  a  time  "back' 
of  history,"  says  one  of  the  popular 
leaders  in  the  Woman's  movement,  "when 
men  and  women  were  friends  and  com- 
rades —  but  from  that  time  to  this  she 
(woman)  has  held  a  subsidiary  and  ex- 
clusively feminine  position.  The  world 
has  been  wholly  in  the  hands  of  men,  and 
they  have  believed  that  men  alone  had  the 
ability,  felt  the  necessity,  for  developing 
civilization,  the  business,  education,  and 
religion  of  the  world." 

Women's    present    aim    she    declares 
to  be  the  "reassumption  of  their  share 
in   human   life."     This   is,   of  course,   a 
222 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

modern  putting  of  the  List  of  Grievances 
with  which  the  miHtant  campaign  started 
in  this  country  in  the  40's,  reenforced 
by  the  important  point  that  women  "back 
of  history"  enjoyed  the  privileges  which 
the  earher  mihtants  declared  that  man, 
"having  in  direct  object  the  establish- 
ment of  an  absolute  tyranny  over  her," 
had  always  usurped. 

Just  how  the  lady  knows  that  "back 
of  history"  women  and  men  were  more 
perfect  comrades  than  to-day,  I  do  not 
know.  Her  proofs  would  be  interesting. 
If  this  is  true,  it  reverses  the  laws  which 
have  governed  all  other  human  relations. 
Certainly,  since  history  began,  the  only 
period  where  I  can  pretend  to  judge  what 
has  happened,  the  records  show  that  com- 
radeship between  men  and  women  has  risen 
and  fallen  with  the  rise  and  fall  of  cultiva- 
tion and  of  virtue.  The  general  level  is 
probably  higher  to-day  than  ever  before. 
223 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

Moreover,  from  these  same  records 
one  might  support  as  plausibly  —  and  as 
falsely  —  the  theory  of  a  Woman-made 
World  as  the  popular  one  of  a  Man-made 
World.  There  has  been  many  a  teacher 
and  philosopher  who  has  sustained  some 
form  of  this  former  thesis,  disclaiming 
against  the  excessive  power  of  women  in 
shaping  human  ajffairs.  The  teachings  of 
the  Christian  Church  in  regard  to  women, 
the  charge  that  she  keep  silent,  that  she 
obey,  that  she  be  meek  and  lowly  —  all 
grew  out  of  the  fear  of  the  power  she 
exercised  at  the  period  these  teachings 
were  given  —  a  power  which  the  saints 
believed  prejudicial  to  good  order  and 
good  morals.  There  is  more  than  one 
profound  thinker  of  our  own  period  who 
has  arraigned  her  influence  —  Strindberg 
and  Nietzsche  among  them.  You  can- 
not turn  a  page  of  history  that  the  woman 
is  not  on  it  or  behind  it.  She  is  the  most 
224 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

subtle  and  binding  thread  in  the  pattern 
of  Human  Life  ! 

For  the  American  Woman  of  to-day  to 
allow  woman's  part  in  the  making  of  this 
nation  to  be  belittled  is  particularly- 
unjust  and  cowardly.  The  American 
nation  in  its  good  and  evil  is  what  it  is, 
as  much  because  of  its  women  as  because 
of  its  men.  The  truth  of  the  matter  is, 
there  has  never  been  any  country,  at 
any  time,  whatever  may  have  been  their 
social  limitations  or  political  disbarments, 
that  women  have  not  ranked  with  the 
men  in  actual  capacity  and  achievement; 
that  is,  men  and  women  have  risen  and 
fallen  together,  whatever  the  apparent 
conditions.  The  failure  to  recognize  this 
is  due  either  to  ignorance  of  facts  or  to  a 
willful  disregard  of  them;  usually  it  is 
the  former.  For  instance,  one  constantly 
hears  to-day  the  exultant  cry  that  women 
finally  are  beginning  to  take  an  interest 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

and  a  part  in  political  and  radical  dis- 
cussions. But  there  has  never  been  a 
time  in  this  country's  history  when  they 
were  not  active  factors  in  such  discussion. 
The  women  of  the  American  Revolution- 
ary Period  certainly  challenge  sharply 
the  women  of  to-day,  both  by  their 
intelligent  understanding  of  political  is- 
sues and  by  their  sympathetic  coopera- 
tion in  the  struggle.  It  was  the  letters 
of  women  which  led  to  that  most  impor- 
tant factor  in  centralizing  and  instruct- 
ing pre-revolutionary  opinion  in  New 
England,  the  Committee  of  Correspond- 
ence. There  were  few  more  powerful 
political  pamphleteers  in  that  period 
than  Mercy  Warren.  We  might  very 
well  learn  a  lesson  which  we  need  very 
much  to  learn  from  the  way  women  aided 
the  Revolutionary  cause  through  their 
power  as  consumers.  As  for  sacrifice 
and  devotion,  that  of  the  woman  loses 
226 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

nothing  in  nobility  when  contrasted  with 
that  of  the  man. 

If  we  jump  fifty  years  in  the  nation's 
history  to  the  beginning  of  the  agitation 
against  slavery,  we  find  women  among 
the  first  and  most  daring  of  the  pro- 
testants  against  the  institution.  It  was 
for  the  sake  of  shattering  slavery  that 
they  broke  the  silence  in  public  which  by 
order  of  the  Christian  Church  they  had  so 
long  kept  —  an  order  made,  not  for  the 
sake  of  belittling  women,  but  for  the  sake  of 
establishing  order  in  churches  and  better 
insuring  the  new  Christian  code  of  moral- 
ity. The  courage  and  the  radicalism  of 
women  of  the  30's,  40's,  and  50's  in  this 
country  compare  favorably  with  that  of 
the  men  and  women  in  any  revolutionary 
period  in  any  country  that  we  may 
select. 

The  American  woman  has  played  an 
honorable  part  in  the  making  of  our 
227 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

country,  and  for  this  part  she  should 
have  full  credit.  If  she  had  been  as  poor 
a  stick,  as  downtrodden  and  ineffective 
as  sometimes  painted,  she  would  not  be  a 
fit  mate  for  the  man  beside  whom  she  has 
struggled,  and  she  would  be  as  utterly 
unfit  for  the  larger  life  she  desires  as 
the  most  bigoted  misogynist  pictures  her 
to  be. 

Moreover,  all  things  considered,  she 
has  been  no  greater  sufferer  from  injustice 
than  man.  I  do  not  mean  in  saying  this 
that  she  has  not  had  grave  and  unjust 
handicaps,  legal  and  social;  I  mean  that 
when  you  come  to  study  the  comparative 
situations  of  men  and  women  as  a  mass 
at  any  time  and  in  any  country  you  will 
find  them  more  nearly  equal  than  un- 
equal, all  things  considered.  Women 
have  suffered  injustice,  but  parallel  have 
been  the  injustices  men  were  enduring. 
It  was  not  the  fact  that  she  was  a  woman 
228 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

that  put  her  at  a  disadvantage  so  much 
as  the  fact  that  might  made  right,  and 
the  physically  weaker  everywhere  bore 
the  burden  of  the  day.  Go  back  no 
further  than  the  beginnings  of  this  Re- 
public and  admit  all  that  can  be  said 
of  the  wrong  in  the  laws  which  pre- 
vented a  woman  controlling  the  property 
she  had  inherited  or  accumulated  by 
her  own  efforts,  which  took  from  her  a 
proper  share  in  the  control  of  her  child,  — 
we  must  admit,  too,  the  equal  enormity 
of  the  laws  which  permitted  man  to  ex- 
ploit labor  in  the  outrageous  way  he  has. 
It  was  not  because  he  was  a  man  that 
the  labor  was  exploited  —  it  was  because 
he  was  the  weaker  in  the  prevailing  sys- 
tem. Woman's  case  was  parallel  —  she 
was  the  weaker  in  the  system.  It  had 
always  been  the  case  with  men  and  women 
in  the  world  that  he  who  could  took  and 
the  devil  got  the  hindermost.  The  way 
229 


THE  BUSINESS   OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

the  laborer's  cause  has  gone  hand  in  hand 
in  this  country  the  last  hundred  years 
with  the  woman's  cause  is  a  proof  of  the 
point.  In  the  30 's  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, for  illustration,  the  country  was  torn 
by  a  workingman's  party  which  carried 
on  a  fierce  agitation  against  banks  and 
monopolies.  Many  of  its  leaders  were 
equally  ardent  in  their  support  of 
Women's  Rights  as  they  were  then  under- 
stood. The  slavery  agitation  was  coupled 
from  the  start  with  the  question  of 
Women's  Rights.  It  was  injustice  that 
was  being  challenged  —  the  right  of  the 
stronger  to  put  the  weaker  at  a  disadvan- 
tage for  any  reason  —  because  he  was 
poor,  not  rich;  black,  not  white;  female, 
not  male,  — that  is,  there  has  been  nothing 
special  to  women  in  the  injustice  she 
has  suffered  except  its  particular  form. 
Moreover,  it  was  not  man  alone  who  was 
responsible  for  this  injustice.  Stronger 
230 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

women  have  often  imposed  upon  the 
weak  —  men  and  women  —  as  strong  men 
have  done.  In  its  essence,  it  is  a  human, 
not  a  sex,  question  —  this  of  injustice. 

The  hesitation  of  this  country  in  the 
earlier  part  of  the  nineteenth  century  to 
accord  to  women  the  same  educational 
facilities  as  to  men  is  often  cited  as  a  proof 
of  a  deliberate  effort  to  disparage  women. 
But  it  should  not  be  forgotten  that  the 
wisdom  of  universal  male  education  was 
hotly  in  debate.  One  of  the  ideals 
of  radical  reformers  for  centuries  had 
been  to  give  to  all  the  illumination  of 
knowledge.  But  to  teach  those  who  did 
the  labor  of  the  world,  its  peasants  and 
its  serfs,  was  regarded  by  both  Church 
and  State  as  a  folly  and  a  menace.  It  was 
the  establishment  of  a  pure  democracy 
that  forced  the  experiment  of  universal 
free  instruction  in  this  country.  It  has 
met  with  opposition  at  every  stage,  and 
231 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

there  is  to-day  a  Mr.  Worldly  Wiseman 
at  every  corner  bewailing  the  evils  it  has 
wrought.  He  must,  too,  be  a  hopeless 
Candide  who  can  look  on  our  experiment, 
wonderful  and  inspiring  as  it  is,  and  say 
its  results  have  been  the  best  possible. 

It  was  entirely  logical,  things  beings 
as  they  were,  that  there  should  have  been 
strong  opposition  to  giving  girls  the  same 
training  in  schools  as  boys.  That  ob- 
jection holds  good  to-day  in  many  reflec- 
tive minds.  He  again  must  be  a  hopeless 
optimist  who  believes  that  we  have 
worked  out  the  best  possible  system  of 
education  for  women.  But  that  there 
was  opposition  to  giving  women  the  same 
educational  facilities  as  men  was  not 
saying  that  there  was  or  ever  had  been 
a  conspiracy  on  foot  to  keep  her  in  intel- 
lectual limbo  because  she  was  a  woman. 
The  history  of  learning  shows  clearly 
enough  that  women  have  always  shared 
232 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

in  its  rise.  In  the  great  revival  of  the 
sixteenth  century  they  took  an  honorable 
part.  "I  see  the  robbers,  hangmen, 
adventurers,  hostlers  of  to-day  more 
learned  than  the  doctors  and  preacher 
of  my  youth,"  wrote  Rabelais,  and  he 
added,  "why,  women  and  girls  have 
aspired  to  the  heavenly  manna  of  good 
learning."  Whenever  aspiration  has  been 
in  the  air,  women  have  responded  to  it 
as  men  have,  and  have  found,  as  men 
have  found,  a  way  to  satisfy  their  thirst. 
To  come  down  to  the  period  which 
concerns  us  chiefly,  that  of  our  own  Re- 
public, it  is  an  utter  misrepresentation 
of  the  women  of  the  Revolution  to  claim 
that  they  were  uneducated.  All  things 
considered,  they  were  quite  as  well  edu- 
cated as  the  men.  The  actual  achieve- 
ments of  the  eminent  women  produced 
by  the  system  of  training  then  in  vogue 
is  proof  enough  of  the  statement.  Far 
233 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

and  away  the  best  letters  by  a  woman, 
which  have  found  their  way  into  print 
in  this  country,  are  those  of  Mrs.  John 
Adams,  written  late  in  the  eighteenth 
century  and  early  in  the  nineteenth.  They 
deserve  the  permanent  place  in  our  litera- 
ture which  they  have.  But  it  was  a  period 
of  good  letter  writing  by  women  —  if 
weak  spelling  and  feminine  spelling  was, 
on  the  whole,  quite  as  strong  as  mascu- 
line ! 

Out  of  that  early  system  of  education 
came  the  woman  who  was  to  write  the 
book  which  did  more  to  stir  the  country 
against  slavery  than  all  that  ever  had 
been  written,  Harriet  Beecher  Stowe. 
That  system  produced  the  scientist,  who 
still  represents  American  women  in  the 
mind  of  the  world,  Maria  Mitchell,  the 
only  American  woman  whose  name  ap- 
pears among  the  names  of  the  world's 
great  scholars  inscribed  on  the  Boston 
£34 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

Public  Library.  It  produced  Dorothea 
Dix,  who  for  twenty  years  before  the 
Civil  War  carried  on  perhaps  the  most 
remarkable  investigation  of  conditions 
that  has  ever  been  made  in  this  country 
by  man  or  woman,  —  the  one  which  re- 
quired the  most  courage,  endurance,  and 
persistency,  —  her  investigation  of  the 
then  barbaric  system  for  caring — or  not 
caring — for  the  insane.  State  after  state 
enacted  new  laws  and  instituted  new 
methods  solely  on  the  showing  of  this 
one  woman.  If  there  were  no  other  case 
to  offer  to  the  frequent  cry  that  women 
have  never  had  an  influence  on  legislation, 
this  would  be  enough.  Moreover,  this 
is  but  the  most  brilliant  example  of  the 
kind  of  work  women  had  been  doing  from 
the  beginning  of  the  Republic. 

To  my  mind  there  is  no  phase  of  their 
activities  which  reveals  better  the  genu- 
ineness of  their  training  than  the  initia- 
236 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

tive  they  took  in  founding  schools  of  ad- 
vanced grades  for  girls,  and  in  organizing 
primary  and  secondary  schools  on  some- 
thing like  a  national  scale.  Mary  Lyon's 
work  for  Mt.  Holyoke  College  and  Cath- 
erine Beecher's  for  the  American  Wo- 
man's Education  Association  are  the 
most  substantial  individual  achievements, 
though  they  are  but  types  of  what  many 
women  were  doing  and  what  women  in 
general  were  backing  up.  It  was  work 
of  the  highest  constructive  type — origi- 
nal in  its  conception,  full  of  imagination 
and  idealism,  rich  in  its  capacity  for 
growth  —  a  work  to  fit  the  aspiration  of 
its  day  and  so  full  of  the  future  ! 

Now,  when  conditions  are  such  that  a 
few  rise  to  great  eminence  from  the  ordi- 
nary ranks  of  life,  it  means  a  good  general 
average.  The  multitude  of  women  of 
rare  achievements,  distinguishing  the 
Revolutionary  and  post-Revolutionary 
236 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

periods  of  American  history  are  the  best 
evidences  of  the  seriousness,  idealism, 
and  intelligence  of  the  women  in  general. 
Their  services  in  the  war  are  part  of  the 
traditions  of  every  family  whose  line 
runs  back  to  those  days.  Loyal,  spirited, 
ingenious,  and  uncomplaining,  they  are 
one  of  the  finest  proofs  in  history  of  the 
capacity  of  the  women  of  the  mass  to 
respond  whole-heartedly  to  noble  ideals, 
—  one  of  the  finest  illustrations,  too,  of 
the  type  of  service  needed  from  women 
in  great  crises.  But  the  rank  and  file 
which  conducted  itself  so  honorably  in 
the  Revolution  was  not  a  whit  more 
noble  and  intelligent  than  the  rank  and 
file  of  the  succeeding  period.  It  would 
have  been  impossible  ever  to  have  es- 
tablished as  promptly  as  was  done  the 
higher  and  the  general  schools  for  girls 
if  women  had  not  given  them  the  support 
they  did,  had  not  been  willing,  as  one 
237 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

great  educator  of  the  early  part  of  the 
nineteenth  century  has  recorded  —  "to 
rise  up  early,  to  sit  up  late,  to  eat  the 
bread  of  the  most  rigid  economy,  that 
their  daughters  might  be  favored  with 
means  of  improvement  superior  to  what 
they  themselves  possessed."  And  back 
of  this  self-denial  was  what  ?  A  desire 
that  life  be  made  easier  for  the  daughter  ? 
Not  at  all  —  a  desire  that  the  daughter 
be  better  equipped  to  "form  the  character 
of  the  future  citizen  of  the  Republic." 

It  is  not  alone  that  justice  is  wounded 
by  denying  women  a  part  in  the  making 
of  the  civilized  world  —  a  more  immedi- 
ate wrong  is  the  way  the  movement  for 
a  fuller,  freer  life  for  all  human  beings  is 
hampered.  A  woman  with  a  masculine 
chip  on  her  shoulder  gives  a  divided  at- 
tention to  the  cause  she  serves.  She 
complicates  her  human  fight  with  a  sex 
fight.  However  good  tactics  this  may 
238 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

have  been  in  the  past,  and  I  am  far  from 
denying  that  there  were  periods  it  may 
have  been  good  politics,  however  poor 
morals,  surely  in  this  country  to-day  there 
is  no  sound  reason  for  introducing  such 
complications  into  our  struggles.  The 
American  woman's  life  is  the  fullest  in  its 
opportunity,  all  things  considered,  that 
any  human  beings  harnessed  into  a  com- 
plicated society  have  ever  enjoyed.  To 
keep  up  the  fight  against  man  as  the 
chief  hindrance  to  the  realization  of  her 
aspiration  is  merely  to  perpetuate  in  the 
intellectual  world  that  instinct  of  the 
female  animal  to  be  ever  on  guard  against 
the  male,  save  in  those  periods  when  she 
is  in  pursuit  of  him  ! 

But  complicating  her  problem  is  not 
the  only  injury  she  does  her  cause  by 
this  ignoring  or  belittling  of  woman's 
part  in  civilization.  She  strips  herself 
of  suggestion  and  inspiration  —  a  loss 
239 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

that  cannot  be  reckoned.  The  past  is  a 
wise  teacher.  There  is  none  that  can 
stir  the  heart  more  deeply  or  give  to  hu- 
man affairs  such  dignity  and  significance. 
The  meaning  of  woman's  natural  busi- 
ness in  the  world  —  the  part  it  has  played 
in  civilizing  humanity  —  in  forcing  good 
morals  and  good  manners,  in  giving  a 
reason  and  so  a  desire  for  peaceful  arts 
and  industries,  the  place  it  has  had  in 
persuading  men  and  women  that  only 
self-restraint,  courage,  good  cheer,  and 
reverence  produce  the  highest  types  of 
manhood  and  womanhood,  —  this  is  writ- 
ten on  every  page  of  history. 

Women  need  the  ennobling  influence 
of  the  past.  They  need  to  understand 
their  integral  part  in  human  progress. 
To  slur  this  over,  ignore,  or  deny  it,  crip- 
ples their  powers.  It  seVs  them  at  the 
foolish  effort  of  enlarging  their  lives  by 
doing  the  things  man  does  —  not  be- 
240 


ENNOBLING  THE  WOMAN'S  BUSINESS 

cause  they  are  certain  that  as  human 
beings  with  a  definite  task  they  need  —  or 
society  needs  —  these  particular  services 
or  operations  from  them,  but  because  they 
conceive  that  this  alone  will  prove  them 
equal.  The  efforts  of  woman  to  prove 
herself  equal  to  man  is  a  work  of  super- 
erogation. There  is  nothing  he  has  ever 
done  that  she  has  not  proved  herself  able 
to  do  equally  well.  But  rarely  is  society 
well  served  by  her  undertaking  his  ac- 
tivities. Moreover,  if  man  is  to  remain 
a  civilized  being,  he  must  be  held  to  his 
business  of  producer  and  protector.  She 
cannot  overlook  her  obligation  to  keep 
him  up  to  his  part  in  the  partnership,  and 
she  cannot  wisely  interfere  too  much  with 
that  part.  The  fate  of  the  meddler  is 
common  knowledge  ! 

A  few  women  in  every  country  have 
always    and   probably   always   will    find 
work   and   usefulness   and   happiness   in 
B  J241 


THE  BUSINESS  OF  BEING  A  WOMAN 

exceptional  tasks.  They  are  sometimes 
women  who  are  born  with  what  we  call 
"bachelor's  souls"  —  an  interesting  and 
sometimes  even  charming,  though  always 
an  incomplete,  possession  !  More  often 
they  are  women  who  by  the  bungling 
machinery  of  society  have  been  cast  aside. 
There  is  no  reason  why  these  women  should 
be  idle,  miserable,  selfish,  or  antisocial. 
There  are  rich  lives  for  them  to  work  out 
and  endless  needs  for  them  to  meet. 
But  they  are  not  the  women  upon  whom 
society  depends ;  they  are  not  the  ones 
who  build  the  nation.  The  women  who 
count  are  those  who  outnumber  them  a 
hundred  to  one  —  the  women  who  are 
at  the  great  business  of  founding  and 
filling  those  natural  social  centers  which 
we  call  homes.  Humanity  will  rise  or 
fall  as  that  center  is  strong  or  weak.  It 
is  the  human  core. 


242 


THE  following  pages  contain  advertise- 
ments of  books  by  the  same  author  or 
on  kindred  subjects. 


By  the  Same  Author 


The  Tariff  in  Our  Times 

A  Study  of  Fifty  Years'  Experience  with  the 
Doctrines  of  Protection 

i2mo,  $i.jo  net;  postpaid,  $1.62 

"  There  is  scarcely  a  great  event  or  a  public  man  of  impor- 
tance in  the  period  covered  that  does  not  figure  directly  or 
indirectly  in  this  story.  The  result  is  a  narrative  full  of  dra- 
matic situations,  big  movements,  strenuous  fighting,  and  fine 
characters."  —  Philadelphia  North  American. 

"An  interesting  and  exhaustive  treatise  of  the  subject  of 
tariff  and  tariff  making."  —  American  Banker. 

"...  No  single  volume  has  brought  out  the  facts  and  inter- 
ests connected  with  tariff  and  tariff  tinkering  as  does  this  book 
in  which  the  story  is  told  in  narrative  form." 

—  Boston  Transcript. 

"  Miss  Tarbell  has  written  a  work  of  high  value  and  great 
timeliness,  in  her  history  of  the  tariff.  .  .  .  Every  thoughtful 
student  of  the  subject  should  read  Miss  Tarbell's  book,  whether 
he  believes  in  tariff  for  revenue  only,  high  protection,  or  firee 
trade."  —  Wall  Street  Journal. 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  Tork 


SIX  IMPORTANT  BOOKS  BY  IDA  M.  TARBELL 


The  History  of  the  Standard  Oil  Company 

IVtth  many  illustrations,  portraits,  and  reproductions  of  important 
documents.  Two  zwlumes.  Cloth,  8z'o,  second  edition,  $j.oo  net; 
postage  extra. 

"  It  ranks  among  the  few  great  historical  undertakings  of  Ameri- 
can authors  of  this  generation."  —  Outlook. 

Life  of  Abraham  Lincoln 

With  32  full-page  illustrations,  cloth,  8vo,  two  volumes,  boxed, 
$j.oo  net;  expressage  extra. 

Drawn  from  original  sources,  and  containing  many  speeches,  let- 
ters, and  telegrams  hitherto  unpublished. 

Miss  Tarbell's  "Life  of  Abraham  Lincoln"  is  now  enjoying  a 
greater  popularity  and  a  higher  ranking  than  in  any  previous  year 
of  its  publication.  Alone,  it  was  sufficient  in  accomplishment  to 
place  her  in  the  leading  rank  of  biographers,  and  it  promises  to 
hold  indefinitely  its  undisputed  position. 

"  Miss  Tarbell's  work  presents  a  portrait  that  no  student  of  history 
can  afford  to  miss."  —  Brooklyn  Eagle. 

Father  Abraham 

Illustrated  in  colors  by  Blendon  Campbell.     Cloth,  i2*no,  $  .jo  net. 
No  other  has  so  clearly  seen  the  great  throbbing,  suffering,  human 
heart  hidden  under  the  rough,  forceful  character  he  showed  the 
world. 

He  Knew  Lincoln 

Uniform  with  the  author's  "Father  Abraham."    Fourth  edition, 
illustrated  with  colored  frontispiece  by  Blendon  Campbell  and  il- 
lustrations by  Jay  Hambidge.     Cloth,  isnto,  %  .50  net. 
"Told SO  delicately,  humanly,  reverently, that  one  is  better  for  the 
hearing.    One  laughs  and  cries  at  the  sheer  touch  of  nature."  — 
New  York  Times. 

Napoleon :  With  a  Sketch  of  Josephine 

Richly  illustrated,  cloth,  8vo,  sixth  edition,  $2.^0  net. 
"  One  should  be  thankful  for  this  volume  by  Miss  Tarbell,  which 
is  tlie  most  readable  and  authentic  of  all  Napoleon  biographies." 
—  Pittsburg  Gazette. 

Madame  Roland 

Portrait  frontispiece,  cloth,  I2mo,  $1.^0  net. 
An  intimate  biographical  study,  largely  derived  from  hitherto  un- 
published sources,  of  one  of  the  most  interesting  women  of  the 
French  Revolution. 

THE  MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Tifth  Avenue  New  York 


The  Book  of  Woman's  Power 

Introduction  by  Miss  Ida  M.  Tarbell 

Cloth,  i6mo,  $i^j  net;  leather,  $i.7S  net 

In  this  book  are  brought  together  and  set  forth  simply  and  with- 
out contention  the  best  which  has  been  written  of  the  potent,  varied 
relation  of  Woman  to  Society.  Whether  its  readers  favor  "  votes  for 
women"  or  not,  the  book  will  make  an  especial  appeal  to  the  atten- 
tion of  all  interested'in  that  subject. 


Woman  and  Social  Progress 

A  Discussion  of  the  Biologic,  Domestic,  Industrial, 
AND  Social  Possibilities  of  American  Women 

By  SCOTT  NEARING  and 
NELLIE   M.    S.    NEARING 

Cloth,  $/.jo  net;  postpaid,  $1.62 

In  this  discussion  of  Woman  and  Social  Progress,  the  authors 
are  not  at  all  concerned  with  the  relations  of  woman's  capacity  to 
man's,  but  with  the  relation  of  her  capacity  to  her  opportunities  and 
to  her  achievement.  The  biologic,  domestic,  industrial,  and  social 
possibilities  of  American  women  are  discussed  at  length.  The 
work  proves  that  women  have  capacity,  and  that  it  matters  not  a 
whit  whether  that  capacity  be  equal  to  man's,  inferior,  or  superior.  If 
women  have  capacity,  if  they  are  capable  of  achievement,  then  they 
can,  as  individuals,  play  a  part  in  the  drama  of  life.  The  world 
abounds  in  work,  a  great  deal  of  which  will  not  be  done  at  all  unless 
it  is  done  by  women.  If  it  can  be  shown  that  women  have  capacity 
for  work,  every  relation  of  social  justice  and  every  need  of  social 
progress  demand  that  this  opportunity  and  this  capacity  be  corre- 
lated in  such  a  manner  as  to  insure  women's  achievement.  These 
are  the  theses  which  are  proposed  in  the  early  chapters  of  the  work. 
Succeeding  chapters  contain  the  solution,  viz. :  that  women's 
capacity,  if  combined  with  opportunity,  will  necessarily  result  in 
achievement ;  that  therefore  they  should  take  their  places  as  individ- 
uals in  the  vanguard  of  an  advancing  civilization. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Fublisheri  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  Tork 


The  Ladies'  Battle 

By  molly   ELLIOT   SEAWELL 

Cloth,  i2mo,  $i,oo  net;  postpaid,  $i.o6 

What  the  American  Press  says  of  "  The  Ladies'  Battle  " 

New  York  Evening  Post. 

"  Molly  Elliot  Seawell  presents  a  powerful  plea  against  votes  for 
women.  The  writer  has  briefed  her  argument  admirably,  developed 
her  points  clearly,  and  6n  the  much-disputed  subject  of  the  influence 
of  woman  suffrage  in  classic  Colorado,  she  gives  evidence  of  a 
highly  impressive  nature." 

New  York  Press. 

"  That  it  should  remain  for  a  woman  to  build  up  the  most  power- 
ful argument  against  votes  for  women,  is  one  of  the  odd  features  of 
the  controversy.  It  seems  that  Molly  Elliott  Seawell  has  said  pretty 
much  the  last  word  against  granting  the  ballot  to  her  own  sex." 

Omaha  World-Herald. 

"All  women  interested  in  woman  suffrage  should  read  the  best 
all-round  argument  yet  presented  against  suffrage,  in  '  The  Ladies' 
Battle,*  by  Molly  Elliot  Seawell." 

Boston  Transcript. 

"  The  second  reason  given  by  Miss  Seawell  against  woman  suf- 
frage is  sound  and  weighty.  The  grant  of  suffrage  to  woman  would 
deprive  her  of  all  property  privileges,  including  the  wife's  right  to 
maintenance  from  her  husband.  What  this  means  can  be  appreci- 
ated only  when  the  extent  of  the  property  privileges  now  enjoyed  by 
women  is  understood." 

Montreal  Gazette. 

"  The  philosophic  case  against  woman  suffrage  is  presented  by 
Molly  Elliot  Seawell." 

Albany  {N.  Y.)  Journal. 

"It  is  doubtful  if  there  is  a  stronger  presentation  of  the  anti- 
suffrage  side  of  the  case  than  that  of  Miss  Molly  Elliot  Seawell." 

Hartford  (Conn.)  Times. 

" '  The  Ladies'  Battle '  is,  perhaps,  the  most  powerful  and  logical 
argument  against  conferring  the  ballot  on  woman  which  any  woman 
has  ever  written." 


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